A High-Precision Hybrid Analog and Digital Beamforming Transceiver System for 5G Millimeter-Wave Communication

In this paper, the development of a millimeter-wave hybrid beamforming (HBF) transceiver system for 5G millimeter-wave multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication is presented. The developed transceiver system is operated at 28-GHz band in the time division duplex (TDD) mode, with 500-MHz signal bandwidth. To implement high beamforming accuracy, a phased-array-based HBF transceiver with high-precision phase shifting network (PSN) at intermediate-frequency (IF)-paths is proposed. The designed PSN has 8-bit phase resolution within 360° range and 0.13-dB amplitude variation. With the use of such low-cost 8-bit PSN, this HBF transceiver system achieves 0.6° beam resolution and a good RF transceiver performance. In addition, under the over-the-air MIMO communication test with two data streams, the error vector magnitude (EVM) of the received signals at two user equipment (UE) is 2.58% and 2.34%. The high-data rate millimeter-wave communication and MIMO performance of this HBF are verified.