Time Modulated Array and Time Variant Filter Techniques to Reduce Receiver Hardware Complexity and Power Consumption

Sustainability is a key goal for 6G, which focuses on minimizing the environmental impact of network operations through energy-efficient designs, agile architectures, and renewable energy sources. While traditional hardware is designed to optimize its performance with maximum functionalities to cover all possible scenarios, this often results in high system complexity. Therefore, scalable system performance with good power efficiency and moderate hardware complexity is key to 6G sustainability. This paper explores power reduction and performance/functionalities trade-offs combining two recently proposed time-variant CMOS radio receiver techniques: 1) a Time Modulated Array (TMA) technique that re-uses a single 4-element phased array to concurrently receive data streams from 5 different beam directions; 2) a time-interleaved Analog Finite Impulse Response Filter (AFIR) with embedded frequency translation realizing the selectivity to separate the 5 data streams. The aim of the paper is to assess the realistically achievable power and hardware complexity savings and relevant trade-offs with radio performance.