Effect of Element Number Reduction on Inter-User Interference and Chip Temperatures in Passively-Cooled Integrated Antenna Arrays for 5G

The impact of reducing the total number of elements in passively-cooled, chip-integrated and space-tapered 5G base station antenna arrays on inter-beam interferences and chip temperatures is investigated for multi-user space-division-multiple-access applications. A convex element position optimization algorithm is used to synthesize the array layouts with minimized side lobes within a pre-defined cell sector. The multi-beam radiation patterns are computed to study the average trend of the maximum side lobe level with the element number. Thermal simulations are also performed by considering the same EIRP for all the arrays. The results indicate that, after an optimal number of elements, adding more elements to an array does not help reduce the inter-user interference further or provide significant advantage on decreasing the chip temperatures.