Millimeter Wave Receiver Design Using Low Precision Quantization and Parallel $\Delta \Sigma $ Architecture

The use of high-frequency millimeter wave (mmWave) bands for 5G communication systems has received much attention over the last few years. Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) contribute significantly to the implementation cost and power consumption of wireless receivers. The use of large antenna arrays in mmWave communications causes these costs to rise even further. Using low precision quantizers in ADCs can reduce these costs significantly. In this paper, we propose a novel receiver design using low precision quantizers drawing ideas from the parallel ADC design literature. Utilizing structural similarities between multi-antenna receivers and parallel ADCs, we show that the signal-to-noise ratio and achievable rate, respectively, scale linearly and logarithmically with the number of antennas. We also extend the idea to the scenario where multiple streams can be transmitted simultaneously. Our simulations of the receiver show promising bit error rate performance under different scenarios and also show how error control coding can be incorporated to improve performance. All our designs depend only on symbol rate sampling, which eliminates costly oversampling of high bandwidth signals.