A Full-FoV Autonomous Hybrid Beamformer Array with Unknown Blockers Rejection and Signals Tracking for Low-Latency 5G mm-Wave Links

Abstract

This paper demonstrates an eight-element multipleinput-multiple-output (MIMO) hybrid beamforming receiver array with autonomous millimeter-wave (mm-Wave)/RF frontend beamforming and digital baseband beamforming. It enables autonomous dynamic suppression of unknown blockers and beamforming on unknown desired signals, without knowing their carrier frequency, angle-of-arrival (AoA), and modulation scheme as a priori. After autonomous cancellation of an in-band/cochannel wideband-modulated blocker, a widebandmodulated desired signal is measured with high SNR, achieving -25.7-dB EVM for 6-Gb/s 64 QAM and -31.8-dB EVM for 1.6-Gb/s 256 QAM. Without baseband DSP beam-searching, the closed-loop mm-Wave/RF front-end beamformer (BF) realizes <;1-μs rapid response per stage, 100-to-1000× faster than existing mm-Wave analog/digital BFs with DSP beam-searching. The eight-element MIMO receiver array covers a wide frequency range (23-30 GHz) and the full field-of-view (FoV) to address future low-latency applications of practical 5G MIMO systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first MIMO receiver array enabling autonomous wideband-modulated 64-/256-QAM blocker rejection and desired signal beamforming with μs response time.