A 25–30 GHz Fully-Connected Hybrid Beamforming Receiver for MIMO Communication

This paper presents a “fully-connected” hybrid beamforming receiver that independently weights each element in an antenna array prior to separate downconversion chains that output independent baseband streams. A receiver architecture is introduced, which implements RF-domain complex-valued Cartesian weighting, RF-domain combining, and multi-stream heterodyne complex-quadrature downconversion. Each RF-domain Cartesian weight is implemented by a pair of 5-bit digitally controlled programmable-gain amplifiers, whose outputs are combined with the weighted signals from other antennas prior to complex-quadrature downconversion. Signal combination is performed by a wideband small-footprint distributed active combiner. A 25-30 GHz hybrid beamforming receiver with eight antenna inputs and two baseband output streams is designed in 65-nm CMOS. In each antenna path, the receiver achieves 34-dB conversion gain, 7.3-dB minimum noise figure, and 5 GHz of RF bandwidth. The entire receiver consumes 340 mW (equivalent to 27.5 mW per antenna per stream) including low-noise amplification, RF-domain beamforming, multi-stream downconversion, and local oscillator generation and distribution circuitry. The receiver occupies 3.86 mm
²
excluding pads, equivalent to 0.36 mm
²
per antenna per stream. Single-element characterization results are presented, along with characterization of several spatial processing techniques including interference cancellation (20 dB peak to null for two elements), simultaneous two-stream reception, and adaptive-codebook-search-based beam acquisition.