10.3 A 12nm CMOS RF Transceiver Supporting 4G/5G UL MIMO

Abstract

With the explosion of online streaming, artificial intelligence and mobile computing, higher wireless data-rates are required, which in 5G NR are achieved by adopting massive MIMO and Carrier Aggregation (CA) with a wide channel bandwidth (BW) up to 200MHz. Together with the requirement for LTE+NR Dual Connectivity (EN-DC), the transceiver (XCVR) and RF front-end complexity increases dramatically requiring new techniques to maintain a small and cost-effective RF implementation. In this work, a 12nm CMOS 2/3/4/5G multi-RAT (Radio Access Technology) XCVR is presented, capable of supporting up to 6 inter-band CA DL with flexible 4×4 MIMO port selection and 2 inter-band CA UL with coherent 2×2 MIMO. In NR 200MHz 4×4 MIMO 256-QAM mode a throughput up to 5Gb/s can be achieved.