A 1.8Gb/s 70.6pJ/b 128×16 link-adaptive near-optimal massive MIMO detector in 28nm UTBB-FDSOI

This work presents a 2.0mm2 128×16 massive MIMO detector IC that provides 21dB array gain and 16x multiplexing gain at the system level. The detector implements iterative expectation-propagation detection (EPD) for up to 256-QAM modulation. Tested with measured channel data [1], the detector achieves 4.3dB processing gain over state-of-the-art massive MlMo detectors [2, 3], enabling 2.7x reduction in transmit power for battery-powered mobile terminals. The iC uses link-adaptive processing to meet a variety of practical channel conditions with scalable energy consumption. The design is realized in a condensed systolic array architecture and an approximate moment-matching circuitry to reach 1.8Gb/s at 70.6pJ/b. The performance and energy efficiency can be tuned over a wide range by UTBB-FDSOI body bias.