Supervision of human vital signs has always been an essential part in healthcare. Nowadays there is a strong interest in contact-less monitoring methods as they operate less static and offer higher flexibility to the people observed. Recent industrial development enabled radar functionality to be packed in single-chip solutions, decreasing application complexity and speeding up designs. Within this thesis, a vital sign radar prototype has been developed utilising a recently released 60GHz frequency modulated continous wave single-chip radar. The electronics development has been focused on compactness and high system integration. Special attention has been given to the onboard analogue signal filtering and digital data preprocessing. The resulting prototype radar is then tested and evaluated using test scenarios with increasing difficulty. The final experiments prove that the radar is capable of tracking human respiration rate and heartbeat simultaneously from a distance of 1m. It can be concluded that modern radar devices may be significantly miniaturised for e.g. portable operation while offering a wide variety of application possibilities including vital sign monitoring.

The power management technique is employed in the direct down-conversion non-quadrature microwave Doppler radar transceiver for the non-contact vital sign detection based on 0.18 µm CMOS technology. The overshoot and undershoot types of the transient waveform distortion and the simultaneous switching noise (SSN) caused by the high speed pulse signal will severely influence the accuracy for the vital sign detection, so that this investigation clearly analyzes the pulse period, pulse width, rise/fall times and the voltage levels of the pulse bias. In the circuit design, the low power current-reused (CRU) power amplifier (PA) can maintain enough output power by using the crucial double primary transformer (DPTF) and balun. The presented LNA with a differential inductor can provide the noise matching needed and increase the transducer gain in order to achieve the optimal power consumption and the transducer gain in the Rx mode. The excellent isolation between the Tx and Rx mode is obtained with the new parallel directed switch. The overall power consumption of the presented transceiver with the optimal pulse bias is 60% lower than the conventional transceiver with the direct current (DC) bias, and the null detection point and DC offset can be eliminated by the tunable phase shifter.

Active integrated antennas (AIAs) are divided into oscillator type AIAs, amplifier type AIAs and frequency-conversion type AIAs. The AIAs designed in this master thesis are oscillator type. Instead of using lumped component like inductors and capacitors, I use a half-wavelength antenna as resonator. In this design, antenna is also treat as a radiated loading. According to reciprocity, antenna receives the reflection signal affected by human body movement and vital sign at the same time. This behavior is regarded as a self-injection locking oscillator. In this master thesis, active antenna is used in monitoring and contacting measurement. In monitoring measurement, active antenna and subject keep their distance. Subject random body movement affects the measured result. Contacting measurement means active antenna pastes on the subject, thus there is no relative displacement between active antenna and subject. Random body movement affect iscancelled in theory. In contacting measurement design some different body motions to test the tolerance of this measurement structure, and use correlation to cancel random body movement. The sensitivity of active antenna structure is enough to detect the vocal vibration in contacting measurement.