Amplifier-Enhanced Memristive Massive MIMO Linear Detector Circuit: An Ultra-Energy-Efficient and Robust-to-Conductance-Error Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces an amplifier-enhanced memristive MCA circuit for massive MIMO detection that is ultra-energy-efficient and robust to conductance errors, improving accuracy and power consumption over existing methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel MCA-based detector circuit that decomposes the channel matrix and employs amplifier circuits, significantly enhancing robustness and energy efficiency.

Findings

Superior performance to conventional MCA-based detectors

Maintains energy efficiency over digital approaches by tens to hundreds of times

Robustness to conductance errors in memristive devices

Abstract

The emerging analog matrix computing technology based on memristive crossbar array (MCA) constitutes a revolutionary new computational paradigm applicable to a wide range of domains. Despite the proven applicability of MCA for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection, existing schemes do not take into account the unique characteristics of massive MIMO channel matrix. This oversight makes their computational accuracy highly sensitive to conductance errors of memristive devices, which is unacceptable for massive MIMO receivers. In this paper, we propose an MCA-based circuit design for massive MIMO zero forcing and minimum mean-square error detectors. Unlike the existing MCA-based detectors, we decompose the channel matrix into the product of small-scale and large-scale fading coefficient matrices, thus employing an MCA-based matrix computing module and amplifier circuits to process the two matrices separately. We present two conductance mapping schemes which are crucial but have been overlooked in all prior studies on MCA-based detector circuits. The proposed detector circuit exhibits significantly superior performance to the conventional MCA-based detector circuit, while only incurring negligible additional power consumption. Our proposed detector circuit maintains its advantage in energy efficiency over traditional digital approach by tens to hundreds of times.