The automotive industry is pushing towards highly assisted and even
autonomous driving cars. To gather a more precise and reliable
representation of the car's surroundings, the sensors and the signal
processing are improving over time and are a subject to continuous
research. One essential sensor is the radar, which is robust and
reliable even in harsh environmental conditions. The primary downside of
a radar is its low resolution compared to lidar or camera-based systems.
To mitigate these drawbacks the resolution of radar systems has to be
improved. The bandwidth has to be increased to improve the range
resolution, and the aperture has to be increased to improve the angular
resolution. Primarily caused by the automotive industry, fully
integrated radar on chip solutions are now available and allow the
construction of more complex radar systems. These radar on chip devices
lay the foundation for radars that fulfill the requirements of increased
resolution for future systems. Although this work is focused automotive
applications, most ideas, concepts, and calculations are also applicable
to other fields. Similar systems may be used in the security sector,
quality control in industrial processes, or gesture detection, to name a
few examples. This thesis shows the development of a conceptual future
radar system for automotive applications. The focus is on providing a
large antenna aperture to achieve the required high angular resolution.
Two genetic algorithms are developed to optimize the antenna array for a
good side lobe level while providing high angular resolution. Two
demonstrators are built to implement certain aspects of the proposed
radar system and prove the general concept viable. The first
demonstrator features a large aperture with a limited side lobe level
and is using a modular approach. The modules are synchronized with a
radio over fiber system. The second demonstrator uses the previously
proposed antenna array, which is implemented with a synthetic a
