A Review of Phased-Array Receiver Architectures for 5G Communications

This paper presents a detailed review of the state-of-the-art phased-array receiver architectures for 5G applications. The basics of multiple antenna phased-arrays and beamforming are discussed. A brief study of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) transmitter-receiver link architecture and comparison between analog, digital and hybrid beamforming is presented, followed by a review of phase shifter architectures. Some recently published digital and fully connected hybrid beamforming receiver architectures are also discussed in detail. The digital beamforming receiver architectures use interference mitigation techniques to relax the RF front-end linearity requirements. The fully connected hybrid beamforming receiver incorporates a Cartesian combining technique for independent gain and phase control. This technique is combined with heterodyne downconversion to allow sharing of the local oscillator (LO) circuitry for signals from multiple antennas.