Metawave Corporation

Metawave is a developer of advanced automotive and aerial imaging radar technology for increased range and point-cloud resolution in all weather conditions. The technology is based on analog front-end beamforming and steering with virtual MIMO array architectures. The company also creates the technologies in building-block architectures capable of meeting different price and size factors.

The company was founded in 2017 by Bernard Casse, Maha Achour, and Sandy Godsey, and is located in Carlsbad, California.

Example of the area SPEKTRA can detect, and the automated beamsteering can follow where the car is headed.

SPEKTRA is Metawave's platform for automotive and aerial imaging radar sensing. The core technology involves the combination of analog front-end beamforming and steering Antenna in Package (AiP) modules, with hybrid MIMO architectures, and a simplified digital signal processing on the backend for 5-dimensional radar capabilities, including range, velocity, angular accuracy, or resolution in the horizontal and vertical directions. The radar has also been tested for use in various weather and lighting conditions for results consistent with clear and even weather and lighting conditions.

This offers a long-range and high-resolution 77GHz radar with imaging capabilities when used in combination with Metawave's AWARE AI engine. The beamforming allows a combination of pencil and fan beams covering a wide field of view with low sidelobes to reduce interference and increase overall object recognition and accuracy. The range offered by Metawave's SPEKTRA is up to 300 meters, which can further aid the earlier detection of possible obstacles in a vehicles way.

Metawave's KLONE are passive reflectors for the deployment of mm-wave 5G networks capable of bending and directing signals in areas of lower coverage. This can be used to relay signals between indoor radios and nodes or between indoor radios and backhaul. They require zero power and do not introduce signal delay, which Metawave suggests is ideal for factory automation. KLONE also offers the lowest CAPEX cost for increased coverage.

Metawave's TURBO are active repeaters for 5G networks capable of boosting the signal to extend coverage in challenging areas. These systems are also steerable, and use analog technology to boost a signal without digitization. The TURBO is capable of boosting a signal coverage up to around 200 meters, and are capable of being installed on light posts and buildings, either indoor or outdoor. Metawave suggests the use case for the TURBO is to extend any 5G wireless deployment in high traffic areas such as cities, arenas, shopping malls, office spaces, and in underutilized areas, such as under bridges, distant corners, and through glass and walls.

AWARE is Metawave's machine learning and artificial intelligence engine for object classification used with SPEKTRA for autonomous vehicles. The AWARE engine uses deep learning methods to extract meaningful information from the signal resulting from the SPEKTRA radar system. When used in combination, Metawave suggests AWARE and SPEKTRA are capable of object detection, classification, and tracking in real time and resolution by training to surpass previous levels of precision. As well, AWARE uses an Adaptive Attention Network (AAN) to take advantage of the beamsteering offered by SPEKTRA, telling the radar where to look next. And it uses a microdoppler signature extraction for better pedestrian detection.