Analog Combiner For Rf Chain Reduction

In this demo, we present an analog combining hardware built for reducing the number of radio frequency (RF) chains in a 5G and beyond wireless communication application. Specifically, the channel state information of a single-cell multi-user massive MIMO system is estimated accurately and cost-effectively by applying the developed configurable analog combining board. RF chain circuits play a major role in digital receiver architectures, allowing passband communication signals to be processed in the baseband. In our previous demo [1], we designed a primary analog combining board of 4 input channels and 2 RF chains. Different from the previous demo, in this demo, we will demonstrate a new more advanced analog combining hardware that brings forth a higher RF reduction ratio, and thus allows us to provide a more flexible experimental setup. We exploit the designed configurable analogy combining hardware to implement hybrid receiver architectures with RF chain reductions. The developed hardware platform is applied to the implementation channel estimation in massive MIMO systems. Our demonstration platform consists of a specially designed configurable analogy combiner board as well as a dedicated experimental setup. The analog combiner board has 16 input channels and 4 RF chains, which can be used to implement virtual larger antenna arrays. By using a dedicated GUI, our demo will illustrate the channel estimation mean-squared errors (MSEs) versus signal SNR and the number of RF chains, as well as the calibration values used for configuring the analog combiner. References: • [1] T. Gong, N. Shlezinger, S. S. Ioushua, M. Namer, Z. Yang, and Y. C. Eldar, "RF chain reduction for MIMO systems: A hardware prototype." IEEE Systems Journal, vol.14, no. 4 pp. 5296-5307, 2020