Channel Estimation Using Deep Learning on an FPGA for 5G Millimeter-Wave Communication Systems

5G millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems enable exciting new applications by significantly reducing the latency and increasing the data rate. However, this comes at a large computational cost, which results in long latency and large energy consumption. In this work, we aim to address this challenge in the problem of channel estimation of such systems through a set of algorithm-hardware co-optimizations. First of all, we employed a model-based neural network to improve the rate of convergence. We also optimized the neural network and achieved improved loss while using approximately the same number of operations. Furthermore, we were able to reduce the computational complexity through the use of sparsity inherent in mmWave channels. The proposed neural network for the channel estimation scales the computational complexity by more than two orders. Based on these innovations, we implemented a channel estimation subsystem on Zynq 7020 FPGA. The subsystem obtains an improvement in latency of up to ~10X and an improvement in energy consumption of up to ~300X over CPU and GPU based systems.