An Energy Efficient Dynamically Reconfigurable QR Decomposition for Wireless MIMO Communication

In this paper, we present a dynamically reconfigurable QR decomposition architecture for agile multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication system. The proposed architecture is meant to address preprocessing bottleneck of MIMO decoding associated with the integration of multiple high speed wireless standards onto a single chip. The architecture is based on fixed point arithmetic, and uses Modified Gram-Schmidt (MGS) algorithm. It supports multiple antenna configurations of 2 × 2, 4 × 4 and 8 × 8, as specified in various wireless standards such as IEEE802.11n/ac, IEEE802.16e/m, 3GPP-LTE, LTE-A. The flexibility for different mode of operation is achieved by a few bit settings and does not require any programming. When implemented using 65 nm standard cell library, the architecture occupies 0.166mm 2, and operates at a maximum up to 256 MHz frequency, and dissipates only 48.2 mW. The measurement results show the proposed reconfigurable rchitecture is superior in terms of area, and power than previously reported QRD architectures for similar applications in the literature.