MIMSO® Antenna
Today’s commodity radar chips struggle to deliver the angular resolution Level 2+ perception needs without cascading expensive multi-chip arrays. MIMSO is a patent-pending sparse-array antenna technique that extracts up to 20× more resolution per radar channel, from any commercial off-the-shelf radar chip.
Applications
Where the cost gap between commodity radar and imaging radar is the gating problem.
Automotive
Sub-degree resolution from a single radar chip — AEB, ACC, blind spot, lane change and Level 2+ perception at a price compatible with mass-market vehicles.
Industrial
High-resolution perception for mining, construction and off-highway autonomy without the multi-chip cost overhead.
Robotics
Warehouse, agricultural and construction robotics that need imaging-radar quality detection in a single-sensor package.
Drones & UAS
Lightweight sense-and-avoid and low-altitude perception for uncrewed aerial platforms, without the size and power cost of multi-chip arrays.
How it works
A three-stage antenna design that gives commodity radar chips imaging-radar performance.
STEP 01
Optimise the antenna spacing
Angular resolution scales with antenna aperture — a wider array resolves closely-spaced targets more cleanly. Reaching that aperture with uniformly-spaced elements would need hundreds of channels, prohibitive on commodity radar silicon. MIMSO places a small number of elements at carefully chosen, unevenly-spaced positions across a wider span, synthesising the resolution of a far larger filled array.
STEP 02
Lower the receive noise floor
Rather than scaling up transmit power to reach further, MIMSO lowers the receive-side noise floor. Carefully-tuned low-noise amplifiers reduce the receiver noise figure, extending detection range and increasing point-cloud density by around 40%. Faint returns at range — distant pedestrians, low-RCS targets, roadside debris — clear the detection threshold rather than being buried in the noise floor.
STEP 03
Fill gaps, suppress side-lobes
Spreading the elements across a wider aperture leaves gaps in the array, and those gaps generate side-lobes — angularly-offset replicas of each target return that smear the point cloud. MIMSO's reconstruction fills the gaps and drives the side-lobes from clearly visible down to negligible, yielding a sharp, dense point cloud with the resolving power of a far larger filled array.
Featured deployment
138-element virtual aperture from one commodity radar chip.
Applied to a single Texas Instruments AWR2944 transceiver, MIMSO delivered a virtual array equivalent to a 138-element filled Uniform Linear Array — a 20× resolution improvement over the chip's native performance. With RaZIR® enhancement on top, the configuration resolved 0.5° azimuth resolution at a price and power envelope incumbent multi-chip cascaded radars cannot reach.
- 138-element virtual array from 4 TX × 12 effective channels
- 0.5° azimuth resolution
- 325 m detection range
- Side-lobes brought from −9 dB native to −20 dB post-reconstruction
What we provide
The MIMSO toolkit, ready to drop into your radar programme.
OEMs and Tier 1s can licence the building blocks below and design antennas tailored to their sensor configuration.
ANTENNA IP
Sparse array IP
The patent-pending sparse-array layouts, minimum-redundancy elevation stacking, and side-lobe-optimised element placements. Configurable for forward-facing, corner and surround sensor configurations.
SIGNAL CHAIN
DSP software
The signal-processing software that reconstructs the sparse array into a clean, dense point cloud. It ships as portable components that integrate into the customer's radar processing chain.
PARTNERSHIP
Integration support
We work alongside your engineering team through the design and integration phase, tuning the sparse-array configuration and signal chain to deliver the best-performing end product on your chosen silicon.
Integration
Works with any commercial off-the-shelf radar chip
MIMSO is not locked to a single silicon vendor. The sparse-array design and DSP software can be applied to any COTS radar transceiver and run alongside an OEM's existing processing chain.
- Any imaging radar transceiver
- Configurable for ADAS, corner and surround sensors
- Portable DSP — runs on existing radar host platforms
Questions, answered
MIMSO Antenna FAQ
MIMSO (Multiple Input Multiple Sparse Output) is Provizio's patent-pending software-defined antenna technique. It combines an optimised sparse-array layout, low-noise receive amplification and DSP reconstruction to extract imaging-radar-class angular resolution from any commercial off-the-shelf radar chip.
Yes. MIMSO is not locked to a single silicon vendor. It has been deployed with Texas Instruments radar transceivers and can be applied to any commercial off-the-shelf radar chipset that exposes per-channel TX/RX control.
A filled-array approach typically uses 2,000+ physical virtual elements to reach high resolution, driving cost and introducing cross-talk between channels. MIMSO delivers comparable or better effective aperture with a fraction of the silicon, controlled side-lobes via DSP, and a cleaner integration path for mass-market vehicles.
Yes. OEMs and Tier 1s licence the antenna IP, DSP software and engineering support, then design antenna configurations specific to their sensor programmes.
Ready to put MIMSO in your radar programme?
Whether you're enhancing an existing radar chipset or designing a next-generation imaging radar, MIMSO provides the antenna IP, DSP software and engineering support to get you to imaging-radar performance from commodity silicon.