Abstract:
Emerging wireless applications such as 5G cellular,
large intelligent surfaces (LIS), and holographic massive MIMO
require antenna array processing at mm-wave frequencies with
large numbers of independent digital transceivers. This paper
summarizes the authors’ recent progress on the design and testing
of 28 GHz and 60 GHz fully-digital array processing platforms
based on wideband reconfigurable FPGA-based software-defined
radios (SDRs). The digital baseband and microwave interfacing
aspects of the SDRs are implemented on single-chip RF systemon-
chip (RF-SoC) processors from Xilinx. Two versions of the
RF-SoC technology (ZCU-111 and ZCU-1275) were used to
implement fully-digital real-time array processors at 28 GHz
(realizing 4 parallel beams with 0.8 GHz bandwidth per beam)
and 60 GHz (realizing 4 parallel beams with 1.8 GHz bandwidth
per beam). Dielectric lenslet arrays fed by a digital phased-array
feed (PAF) located on the focal plane are proposed for further
increasing antenna array gain.