Millimeter-Wave Radar Technology Competition: Forward or Backward | Automotive Radar PCB & Chip Industry Analysis

Millimeter-Wave Radar Technology Competition: Forward or Backward | Automotive Radar PCB & Chip Industry Analysis

Intelligent driving technology has become a commanding height in modern industrial and technological competition. In terms of intelligence and applications, China's industry and technology community has achieved notable progress. However, one critical area — millimeter-wave radar — has not received sufficient attention, despite being the most important sensor for autonomous driving and a major driver of high-frequency PCB (printed circuit board) demand.

The implementation of intelligent driving technology relies on three primary sensor types: millimeter-wave radar, lidar, and camera/video systems. Among these, millimeter-wave radar is arguably the most important for commercial deployment, because it is the only sensor that operates reliably in all weather conditions — including rain, snow, fog and darkness. For example, some autonomous driving test systems use only lidar and omit millimeter-wave radar entirely. While this may be acceptable for controlled testing, future commercial systems must adapt to all-weather operation, and relying solely on lidar will be severely limited. This gap is closely related to the development status of domestic millimeter-wave radar technology and high-frequency PCB manufacturing capability in China.

1. The "Lively" but "Embarrassing" State of Domestic Automotive Radar

According to industry reports, the research and development landscape for domestic automotive millimeter-wave radar in recent years is very "lively": dozens of companies are engaged in automotive millimeter-wave radar development, with investments exceeding tens of millions. Participants span automotive, electronics and information enterprises, local high-tech zones, universities, information industry research institutes, military industry departments, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

However, the other side of this domestic development picture is "embarrassing": core components — including radar MMIC chips and high-frequency PCB substrates — and system technology have not yet achieved substantial breakthroughs. This situation is arguably worse than in the communications and information technology sector.

1.1 Why Millimeter-Wave Radar Lags Behind

From a business perspective, the civilian radar market is currently much smaller than the communications and networking market, making it difficult to attract high-level industry attention. From a technical perspective, millimeter-wave radar technology involves far more high-end technologies and requires deeper technical foundations and greater investment — spanning RF chip design, microwave PCB materials, antenna design and radar signal processing.

People generally understand digital chip technology — CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, FPGAs, domestic processors, supercomputing, and AI chips. There are many practitioners in digital chip design, and the design difficulty is concentrated at the system level, with commercial design tools readily available. Below the functional module level, standard libraries can typically be called to complete designs in a building-block fashion. Digital chip manufacturing processes are also relatively standardized, with etch line width serving as a clear indicator of process capability and design rules. Consequently, there are many foundries and many fabless (manufacturing-free) companies.

Millimeter-wave radar, by contrast, involves a large number of analog chips — including millimeter-wave RF chips and system-on-chip (SoC) devices — whose design and processing are far from standardized. Commercial microwave circuit design tools are currently only simulation tools, not original design tools. Microwave SoC design requires comprehensive knowledge accumulation across radar systems, microwave circuits and components, high-frequency PCB materials, and process implementation methods to perform integrated design. For example, microwave circuit unit interconnection requires careful impedance matching and isolation, while digital unit interconnection design is much looser.

1.2 The Analog Microwave Chip Gap

From a production technology perspective, the minimum line width required for millimeter-wave radar chips is not extreme. For example, Texas Instruments' 79GHz radar chip uses 45nm RFCMOS technology. However, analog microwave circuit design requires designers to have extremely high accumulation of expertise and practical skills. From a production standpoint, achieving product parameter consistency, low noise characteristics, and temperature stability imposes stringent requirements on material purity, process accuracy, and batch consistency — creating high challenges for yield under mass production.

As a result, there are far fewer foreign companies that can provide commercialized microwave chips — such as TriQuint (now Qorvo) in the United States and UMS in France — while there are essentially none in mainland China or Taiwan. If a design is to be produced at a foundry, the designer must thoroughly understand the foundry's design rules before starting, and the rules of different manufacturers vary significantly.

Some estimate that the overall gap between China's digital chip technology and foreign countries is roughly 3 to 5 years. If this estimate is reasonable, the gap between China's analog microwave chip technology and that of foreign countries is roughly double — 6 to 10 years.

2. The Multidisciplinary Challenge — From Chips to High-Frequency PCB

Vehicle-mounted millimeter-wave radar requires the integration of theory and technology across multiple fields:

Microwave antennas: Microstrip patch antennas, antenna arrays, and series-fed arrays designed directly on high-frequency PCB substrates

Microwave integrated circuits (MMIC): Power amplifiers, low-noise amplifiers, mixers, and voltage-controlled oscillators

Microwave system-on-chip (SoC): Single-chip radar transceivers integrating RF, analog and digital functions

Radar systems engineering: Waveform design, beamforming, and target detection algorithms

Intelligent signal processing: FMCW modulation, range-Doppler processing, and angle estimation

Intelligent control algorithms: Sensor fusion and decision-making for ADAS and autonomous driving

Microwave materials: High-frequency PCB laminates such as Rogers RO4350B, RO4003C, RO3003 and PTFE-based substrates with controlled Dk and low Df

Microwave PCB manufacturing: Controlled impedance routing, tight line width/space tolerance, via design, and solder mask control at 24GHz, 77GHz and 79GHz

Currently, no single department or company in China can comprehensively master all these technologies. Most development leaders do not fully understand the difficulty and depth of the problem, and the temptation of huge profits has led some entrepreneurs and developers to adopt a get-lucky mindset. The purpose of this analysis is to alert relevant parties and try to avoid disorderly competition at a low level. There is no objection to developers using foreign core chips for application development, but low-level competition lacking core technology — including both chip design and high-frequency PCB capability — is not a long-term solution.

3. The Future Market Opportunity

The current limited market size and high technical difficulty may explain why millimeter-wave radar has not yet received large-scale industry and government support. However, as AI technology — including intelligent driving — becomes a hot topic, millimeter-wave radar and millimeter-wave sensors may enter all aspects of social life in the future, including:

Intelligent driving and autonomous vehicles (24GHz, 77GHz, 79GHz radar)

Intelligent robots and industrial automation

Production safety monitoring

Public security and surveillance

Smart home and building automation

Healthcare and elderly care

This type of high technology is the cradle of scientific and technological innovation. In the foreseeable future, its application scale may even exceed that of the existing communications market. The question is: can we continue to neglect this field? Can we only buy it from abroad?

4. No Insurmountable Obstacles — But Many Difficulties

The question now is whether China will encounter insurmountable obstacles in the independent development of millimeter-wave radar technology. The answer is: there will be many difficulties, but there are no obstacles that cannot be broken through.

Several domestic military research institutes and universities have accumulated rich experience over the past two to three decades in radar system design and microwave circuit design. Among overseas returnees in recent years, there are skilled experts. The design and production of some microwave chips has already begun in China, and domestic high-frequency PCB manufacturers are gradually building capability in Rogers and PTFE substrate processing.

The current obstacles are not purely technical — they are institutional. There are barriers such as interest division and intellectual property protection issues in cooperation or integration between development organizations and technology owners. Loose small circles within the industry are everywhere, but it is difficult to form substantive cooperation with complementary technologies.

5. Recommendations: Beyond Simply Increasing Investment

In this situation, simply increasing investment is not advisable. What is needed is a mechanism that breaks through interest divisions, integrates domestic related technical resources, upgrades small-workshop achievements to high-end and large-scale industrialization, and integrates individual achievements into a comprehensive, systematic whole. Only entities with strong national backing or substantial capital can accomplish this.

The proposal is for the government to take the lead in bringing together "strengths of specialized skills." The first step is to achieve complete and independent creation of millimeter-wave radar systems for intelligent driving — achieving integrity of product design and manufacturing (including MMIC chips and high-frequency PCB fabrication), automotive-grade reliability, and competitive pricing.

The overall development model should be market-oriented, with three core recommendations:

5.1 ｒｅｐｌａｃｅ Project Bidding with "Technical Bidding"

Set up development projects, but do not use traditional project bidding — ｒｅｐｌａｃｅ it with "technical bidding." Technical bidding is aimed at recruiting talent. Individuals at home and abroad can apply regardless of nationality and age, provided they can provide technical results that are directly useful, testable, and independently created for the project. Approved individuals enter the work as experts, with their benefits mainly reflected in the intellectual property rights and interests held in the final product.

Domestic and foreign development organizations may designate individuals to participate in the bidding, but they need to determine in advance a legal agreement for sharing knowledge and rights between individuals and institutions. Applicants for theories, methods, and schemes are not excluded, but they need to be innovative, practical, and implementable.

The technical application must include a description of the "technical inspection" method and must be implementable. The tenderer may conduct additional inspections to ensure that the technology meets the requirements of the product target. Technical bidding highlights the authentic technology itself.

5.2 Strengthen Intellectual Property Identification and Protection

If technical bidding can be implemented, it will necessarily involve the identification and protection of intellectual property rights. Adding "identification" is necessary. The tenderer has the responsibility to protect the intellectual rights and interests of each bidder during the bidding process.

To this end, the traditional review mechanism must be weakened to give the most vocal technology creators a chance to perform. A "document registration" system can ensure that original contributions are not overwhelmed or even stolen by "reviews," and provide a legal basis for the priority of original contributions. Only rigorous intellectual property protection measures can attract creators, ensure the healthy development of technology, and reduce disputes caused by unclear intellectual property rights.

5.3 Accelerate Professional Talent Training

Accelerating the training of professional talent is a fundamental plan. This type of professional technology requires in-depth multidisciplinary knowledge — spanning microwave engineering, semiconductor design, high-frequency PCB design and radar systems — and requires basic training conditions that most universities currently cannot provide.

A more feasible approach is to support a number of universities with preliminary conditions, and establish a joint training mechanism involving enterprises, microwave integration related research institutes, and universities. Encourage young and interested researchers to challenge difficult subjects. Basic textbooks are not difficult to find. For example, graduate students with electrical engineering and microwave foundations, given good guidance and experimental conditions, should be able to enter design roles after two to three years of study and preparation.

6. Conclusion

Millimeter-wave radar is the most critical sensor for all-weather intelligent driving, yet China's domestic industry remains in a "lively but embarrassing" state — with many participants but limited core technology breakthroughs in both MMIC chips and high-frequency PCB manufacturing. The gap in analog microwave chips is roughly double that of digital chips, and the multidisciplinary nature of radar technology — from chip design to microwave PCB material selection and controlled-impedance fabrication — makes it difficult for any single organization to master all required capabilities.

However, there are no insurmountable technical obstacles. What is needed is not simply more money, but institutional innovation — technical bidding to recruit real talent, rigorous intellectual property protection to reward creators, and joint talent training programs to build the next generation of microwave engineers. As millimeter-wave radar expands from automotive into robotics, industrial safety, public security and beyond, and as high-frequency PCB demand grows alongside it, the time to invest in this foundational technology is now.

People have realized that technological competition is related to people's well-being and national rejuvenation — yet we seem to take it too lightly.

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