A 46 Gbps 12 pJ/b Sparsity-Adaptive Beamspace Equalizer for mmWave Massive MIMO in 22FDX

TL;DR

This paper introduces a 46 Gbps, power-efficient beamspace equalizer ASIC for mmWave massive MIMO systems that leverages sparsity to reduce power consumption with minimal performance loss.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel ASIC implementing SPADE, a sparsity-adaptive equalization technique, achieving high throughput and power savings in mmWave massive MIMO.

Findings

Achieves 46 Gbps throughput.

Offers up to 38% power savings.

Maintains less than 0.7dB SNR degradation.

Abstract

We present a GlobalFoundries 22FDX FD-SOI application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) of a beamspace equalizer for millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The ASIC implements a recently-proposed power-saving technique called sparsity-adaptive equalization (SPADE). SPADE exploits the inherent sparsity of mmWave channels in the beamspace domain to reduce the dynamic power of matrix-vector products by skipping multiplications for which the magnitude of both operands are below pre-defined thresholds. Simulations with realistic mmWave channels show that SPADE incurs less than 0.7dB SNR degradation at 1% target bit error rate compared to antenna-domain equalization. ASIC measurement results demonstrate an equalization throughput of 46Gbps and show that SPADE offers up to 38% power savings compared to antenna-domain equalization. A comparison with state-of-the-art massive MIMO equalizer designs reveals that our ASIC achieves superior normalized energy efficiency.