Millimeter-wave sourceless receiver embedded with DoA estimation

In the currently speculated fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems, one of the critical issues is related to energy efficiency. On the other hand, the transmission speeds of 5G networks are expected to reach or exceed 10 Gbps, which generally requires innovative and high spectral efficiency transmitters and receivers. To fulfill such two basic requirements of 5G systems, a millimeter-wave sourceless receiver technique is proposed and studied in this work. The proposed receiver architecture is a pure passive circuit without internal sources that achieve a high-energy efficiency. The receiver can also detect the incident angle of a radio frequency (RF) signal through embedded direction of arrival (DoA) estimation algorithm.