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Low-resolution Arrays for 5G/6G Millimeter-wave Communications and Sensing

"Challenging the conventional wisdom of radio design"

Traditional radio transceivers and sensor architectures focus on achieving a high level of performance by optimizing circuit/component figures of merit like spur-free dynamic range, and noise figure. However, in an increasingly high-speed, wideband wireless world the power penalty for high component performance is prohibitive. We are exploring the trade-space across materials, devices, circuits, and entire systems to optimize the bandwidth-energy trade-off. This sometimes leads to counter-intuitive designs like radio receivers without LNAs, or mixers with 20-40dB of conversion loss.

The key to this trade-off is defining the interface across “layers of the stack”. For example, an engineered material may be described by a plasma frequency and Lorentz dispersion. At a higher level an active device might be described by a nonlinear model (e.g., EEHEMT) and a circuit by a Volterra series. A component might be described by a high-level gain versus power or noise versus power behavioral equation. And finally the system can be optimized to consider the various trades. We are developing tools that allows us to link all the various optimizations together so we can draw conclusions about the best combination materials, devices, circuit topologies, and system architectures for a given application.

OOK Receivers

The simplest modulation for a low-energy MMW links is the on-off-key (OOK) waveform.  The waveform itself is two-level such that amplitude disortion (nonlinearity) also creates a two-level waveform. This motivates the use of a nonlinear receiver to realize a highly efficient OOK receiver. The simplest OOK receiver is an energy detector with input matching network, a nonlinearity (here, a zero bias diode) and an output filter/matching network. Such a radio has millimeter-wave in, and analog baseband out which can then be digitized by a 1-bit (nonlinear) low-energy ADC (also known as a threshold detector). 

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Fig. 6. - Three detectors measured in this work (BBLNA s not shown). (a) and (b) Standalone detector, primarily used to measure impedance characteristics. (c) and (d) Wireline receiver, used for both wireline and OTA BER measurements with variable $Ka$ -band RF LNA (shown before diode soldering and wirebonding). (e) and (f) Antenna-coupled receiver, used for passive front-end BER measurements.

 

 

Fig. 18. - (a) Block diagram of OTA measurement setup. The antennas are nominal 10-dBi horns, and the receiver has variable RF LNA gain. (b) BER versus RF LNA gain for various transmit power levels indicating points “c,” “d,” and “e” corresponding to eye diagrams in (c)–(e). (c) Eye diagram plotted for a low-gain state at point “c” shows no discernible eye opening, indicating low SNR. (d) Optimal LNA gain of 11.5 dB for high transmit power (point “d”) shows a wide eye opening. (e) In very high-gain states (point “e”), multiple traces are seen crossing the eye opening indicating ISI.

 

Fig. 22. - (a) and (b) Setup for the non-preamplified OTA BER measurements. (c) BER versus range and measured versus coherent BER model (solid trace). The bars show the max and min BERs measured for five BER measurements per range each with PRBS length 1.25E5 (for total $N_{s}\,\,=$ 6.25E5). The line is the geometric mean of the individual BER measurements. (d) Nonpreamplified BER at 20 cm as a function of $R_{j}$ obtained by biasing the antenna-coupled receiver.

Related Publications

[1] N. J. Estes et al., "A 0.71-mW Antenna-Coupled On–Off-Key Receiver for Gbps Millimeter-Wave Wireless Communications," in IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, vol. 71, no. 4, pp. 1793-1808, April 2023,  doi: 10.1109/TMTT.2022.3222424.

[2] N. Estes, K. Gao, B. Hochwald, J. Laneman, J. Chisum, “Efficient modeling of low-resolution millimeter-wave transceivers for massive MIMO wireless communications systems," in Microw. Opt. Techn. Lett. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mop.32727.    

[3] K. Gao, J. N. Laneman, N. J. Estesy, J. Chisum, and B. Hochwald, “Channel Estimation with One-Bit Transceivers in a Rayleigh Environment,” in Proc. 2019 IEEE Globecom Workshop, Waikoloa, HI, USA, Dec. 9-13, 2019.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9024647.