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Original question:

AWR1443BOOST: Bistatic mode of operation

AWR1443BOOST: Faulty RX antenna?

Eddy De Greef
Prodigy 80 points
Part Number: AWR1443BOOST
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: DCA1000EVM, AWR1443

Hi,

we recently purchased 2 AWR1443BOOST EVMs (ES3.0 silicon).

We ported our software to one of them (we previously used ES2.0 boards), but we couldn't make any sense of the data that we collected. After lots of debugging, we noticed that the signal from the first RX channel looked very suspicious. When we tried the second board, it worked just fine. This seems to confirm that there is problem with the first board.

To illustrate the issue, I've made some range profile plots for the 2 boards. The first board gives me something like this:

The signal of the first channel (c0) is significantly higher that of the other channels over most of the range. Moreover, the value does not seems to decrease with distance, as one would expect.

The second board gives me this result:

Here the signals for the 4 antennas are much more similar, as one would expect.

Is there anything that could explain this behavior of our first board, other than a hardware issue on the first channel? Or is the board defective?

Best regards,
Eddy

  • 0
    TI__Guru 58035 points
    Hello Eddy,
    Could you provide more details on how are you capturing the raw ADC data ? Are you using mmwave studio of running an application and looking at the L3 memory to get the data? If its the later then which application are you using in the 1443 device?

    Regards,
    Vivek
  • 0 in reply to Vivek Dham
    Prodigy 80 points

    Hello Vivek,

    thanks for your reply.

    We capture the data using a DCA1000EVM board, but we don't use mmwave studio for that; we built our own capturing tool. On the AWR1443 board, we only run LVDS streaming.

    I'm pretty sure that there is no problem in our code, as it works flawlessly on the 3 other boards.

    Best regards,
    Eddy

  • 0 in reply to Vivek Dham
    Intellectual 350 points

    Hi Vivek,

    I was also wondering for the same request, as Eddy. Is this a faulty device and what we could actually do with it then?

    Or do you have any other suggestions?

    Thank you

    Best

  • 0 in reply to Maxim Rykunov
    TI__Guru 58035 points
    Hello Eddy,
    If you have the DCA1000 then you could also use the mmwave studio tool to capture and process the data. That way we can isolate the HW/board with a pretested capture and analyses tool. Suggest you try that with the faulty boost EVM you have.

    Regards,
    Vivek
  • 0 in reply to Vivek Dham
    Prodigy 80 points

    Hi Vivek,

    I was able to get similar behavior through the mmWave Studio tool (using default settings):

    This seems to confirm my suspicion, isn't it? The signal of the first channel is way different from the other channels.

    If you also conclude that the board is defective, what would be the proper procedure to have it replaced under warranty?

    Best regards,

    Eddy

  • 0 in reply to Eddy De Greef
    TI__Guru 58035 points
    Hello Eddy,
    You are right, there does seem to be unexpected behavior on the CH1. Could you help check one more thing, is the behavior same across all chirps? You an scroll across chirps using the "chirp 1/128" bar in the plot above to view the FFT for other chirps as well.

    Regards,
    Vivek
  • 0 in reply to Vivek Dham
    Prodigy 80 points

    Hello Vivek,

    there is no meaningful difference between the chirps - CH1 stays at the same high level.

    Best regards,
    Eddy

  • 0 in reply to Eddy De Greef
    TI__Guru 58035 points

    Hello Eddy,

    Thanks for the confirmation.  If you can share a snapshot of the mmwave studio connection window after you connected the RS232 and downloaded the BSS/MSS firmware it would display some of the device and FW details. 

    Thanks and regards,

    Vivek 

  • 0 in reply to Vivek Dham
    Prodigy 80 points

    Hello Vivek,

    below you can find some screenshots that I've made with mmWave Studio 1.x and 2.x. Unfortunately, some of the firmware versions aren't entirely visible due to a layout glitch (in the second picture, you can also find the BSS firmware version in the log at the side).

    I've verified that the incorrect behavior is present with both versions of mmWave Studio. Moreover, as I explained initially, we have bought two identical boards, and only one of them is having this problem. A software issue is therefore highly unlikely.

    Thanks and best regards,
    Eddy

  • 0 in reply to Eddy De Greef
    TI__Guru 58035 points
    Hello Eddy,
    Thanks for sharing all the information clearly. It does look like a defective board.
    Could you contact your local TI sales representative to initiate a return of this board?

    Thanks and regards,
    Vivek
  • 0 in reply to Vivek Dham
    Prodigy 80 points

    Thanks for your help, Vivek.

    We'll do that.

    Best regards,
    Eddy