High throughput millimeter-wave MIMO beamforming system for short range communication

Abstract

The interest in short range communication has significantly increased in the last decade with the introduction of different wireless connectivity standards and their evolution such as IEEE802.11n/ac and IEEE802.11ad. New demands for higher resolution multimedia applications such as UHD push for higher data rates to exceed 30Gbps. This high data rate demand requires short range standards to adopt a new approach to accommodate these rates. Millimeter wave enable high bandwidth usage which implies higher capacity to accommodate 10-100Gbps data rates. However, the high data rate pose big challenges to both the system algorithm and architecture. In this paper, we propose a novel FPGA-based high-throughput beamforming MIMO system for millimeter wave short range communication. We present our first realization of a complete millimeter wave short range communication system, which includes RF frontend, ADC/DAC, beamforming control, synchronization, channel estimation, MIMO precoding/detection, and channel encoder/decoder. The design works at millimeter carrier frequency with 500MHz bandwidth and 2-channel MIMO Beamforming. We show realtime application test results as captured in the millimeter wave system.