A 28-GHz Beam-Space MIMO RX With Spatial Filtering and Frequency-Division Multiplexing-Based Single-Wire IF Interface

Abstract

The evolution of mm-wave phased array receivers (RX) to MIMO RX promises multi-beamforming and improved capacity. Although digital beamforming (DBF) provides the highest flexibility, digitization in the beam space as opposed to element space enables ADC digitization scalability with number of beams ( ≤4) and spatial filtering prior to the ADC. mm-Wave MIMO arrays must also address the challenge of increased IO routing while supporting dense fill-factors with λ/2 antenna spacing. In this work, an MIMO beam-space RX array architecture with simultaneous spatial filtering and single wire frequency-domain multiplexing (FDM) is presented. The reconfigurable weighted multi-phase mixing based beam-space RX scheme achieves both: 1) multi-beam formation/spatial filtering and 2) FDM of multiple beam-space outputs, preserving full MIMO field-of-view while ensuring a single IF interface. A 28-GHz four-element RX prototype demonstrates the proposed architecture in 65-nm CMOS. The IC occupies only 3.4 mm × 3.1 mm for a four-element MIMO 28-GHz array and can form four independent beams with >400-MHz 3-dB BW and FDM on to a single IF interface. The array consumes 450 mW and achieves >27-dB beam-to-beam isolation over 150-MHz BW, while consuming 28.1 mW/stream/beam for 28 GHz. Concurrent MIMO measurements with two wireless 28-GHz beams are shown at 400 Mb/s (100 Msps, 16QAM) data rate demonstrating mm-wave MIMO operation.