A Power Efficient Fully Digital Beamforming Architecture for mmWave Communications

A typical wireless transceiver includes a radio frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) and a baseband modem (BBIC) which are connected through an input/output (I/O) interface. The wide-bandwidth and high-rate millimeter wave (mmWave) systems put a heavy burden on the power dissipation of the I/O interface of a transceiver. In this paper, a novel low power fully digital architecture with blind beam tracking and spatial compression (FDA-BTSC) is introduced to reduce the rate and power dissipation of the I/O interface. Spatial compression of the received signal is feasible due to the sparsity of mmWave channels. An efficient spatial compression is realized through codebook-based beamforming and fast blind beam tracking. Provided analysis and evaluations show that the proposed architecture is potentially as power efficient as existing analog and hybrid mmWave architectures. In addition, FDA-BTSC significantly drops the baseband processing complexity and power consumption level to the same order as hybrid beamforming, while it maintains the advantages of the fully digital beamforming in terms of low latency of the beam management and high efficiency of the digital beamforming.