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Low-Resolution Architectures for Power-Efficient Scaling of mmWave Phased Array Receivers

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Abstract

Utilizing mmWave massive MIMO frontends for base station to mobile communication promises unprecedented throughput gains in cellular networks. Power efficiency is a significant bottleneck in scaling to the large array sizes required for closing the link at high frequencies, particularly in the battery-powered handset. Conventional phased array architectures at 100+ GHz require close to 100 mW of power per receive antenna, making them ill-suited for scaling to massive arrays. In this paper, we propose drastically simplified receiver frontend designs that are predicted to slash this per-channel wattage by an order of magnitude or more at 140 GHz. These power savings come at the cost of imperfect beamforming and under-utilization of the array elements and die area. We quantify these tradeoffs for our baseline on-off architecture, as well as 1-bit and 2-bit phase switched arrays. In the lowest resolution setting, on-off beamforming, we show that beamforming efficiency of 70% is achieved with 40% utilization of the aperture. This tradeoff improves significantly with the adoption of even the most coarse (1 or 2 bit) phase control, motivating us to pursue power-optimized designs for low-precision mmWave phase shifters.

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Notes

  1. These numbers do not include the power consumption of the LO that drives the IF mixers, as the values reported in these references were lumped up with that of the LO multiplier, which is a shared component. With the optimistic assumption of only a few mW consumption by each channel’s LO driver, the state of the art design can be assumed to burn 80+ mW per channel (excluding consumption of shared components).

  2. Finding the best possible phasor selection can be done with \(\mathcal {O}(N)\) computational complexity, and only needs to be repeated on the time scale of channel coherence.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by ComSenTer, one of six centers in JUMP, a Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) program sponsored by DARPA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, California, USA

    Maryam Eslami Rasekh, Navid Hosseinzadeh, Upamanyu Madhow & Mark Rodwell

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  1. Maryam Eslami Rasekh
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  2. Navid Hosseinzadeh
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  3. Upamanyu Madhow
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  4. Mark Rodwell
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Correspondence to Maryam Eslami Rasekh.

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Rasekh, M.E., Hosseinzadeh, N., Madhow, U. et al. Low-Resolution Architectures for Power-Efficient Scaling of mmWave Phased Array Receivers. J Sign Process Syst 94, 1005–1014 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-022-01769-0

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