I-Corps: All-digital transceivers for millimeter wave communications

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project covers nearly all applications related to next generation mobile communications technologies, such as connected cars, drones, robots, and smartphones. This wireless technology can unlock the true potential of higher frequency bands by establishing more efficient and robust connections that operate in the millimeter Wave (mmWave) spectrum above 28 GHz. The resulting increased wireless capacity and reduced latency will enable the key use cases that have been defined in the context of 5G, such as interactive Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), autonomous driving, and unmanned robotics. Rapidly exchanging large amount of information wirelessly will be of paramount importance for AR/VR, as it will permit getting rid of the cables connected to the headsets, and for autonomous automotive and robotic systems, as it will enable beyond line-of-sight vision by broadcasting with minimal latency massive amount of data generated by sensors such as lidars, radars, and cameras.This I-Corps project focuses on the design of an all-digital transceiver radio for mmWave communications. The mmWave frequencies of above 28 GHz are necessary to alleviate the spectrum crunch in the traditional cellular bands, and to make ultra-fast 5G use cases a reality. However, challenging propagation characteristics at these frequencies necessitates the use of transceivers that not only operate over low power budgets, but also deliver the robustness that the wireless ecosystem demands. Existing state-of-the-art mmWave analog transceiver radios trade-off robustness against power: they allow the radio to transmit or receive in only one direction or a small number of directions at a time. Conversely, this all-digital beamforming technology allows to look in all directions simultaneously, resulting in more spectral-efficient and robust communications. The defining technical feature in this design is that the signals from each antenna chain are digitized independently, as opposed to existing techniques where the signals from each antenna are first combined in analog and then digitized.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.