What are the RF design considerations for a LiDAR-radar fusion sensor system?

RF design considerations for a LiDAR-radar fusion sensor system focus on ensuring that the radar and lidar sensors can operate simultaneously without mutual interference, and that their data can be accurately fused in space and time for robust perception. The key RF considerations are: electromagnetic interference (EMI) between radar and lidar (radar operates at 77 GHz with several watts of radiated power; while lidar uses infrared light at 905 nm or 1550 nm and is not directly susceptible to RF interference, the radar's EMI can affect the lidar's electronic circuits, particularly its high-gain transimpedance amplifiers, if the sensors are physically close; EMC shielding and filtering on the lidar electronics is essential), radar-to-radar mutual interference (in a multi-sensor vehicle with 4-6 radar sensors, time-division multiplexing or frequency-division assignment prevents the radars from interfering with each other), synchronization (lidar and radar data must be time-stamped with microsecond accuracy to enable accurate spatial registration of the two point clouds at vehicle speeds; a common timing reference, GPS PPS signal or a central timing bus, synchronizes all sensors), coordinate frame alignment (the lidar and radar have different physical positions and orientations on the vehicle; extrinsic calibration determines the rigid-body transformation between sensor frames to align detections in a common vehicle coordinate frame), and complementary detection characteristics (radar provides velocity directly via Doppler while lidar provides higher-resolution 3D shape; fusion exploits these complementary strengths for object classification and tracking).