Digital and Mixed Domain Hardware Reduction Algorithms and Implementations for Massive MIMO

Emerging 5G and 6G based wireless communications systems largely rely on multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems to reduce inherently extensive path losses, facilitate high data rates, and high spatial diversity. Massive MIMO systems used in mmWave and sub-THz applications consists of hundreds perhaps thousands of antenna elements at base stations. Digital beamforming techniques provide the highest flexibility and better degrees of freedom for phased antenna arrays as compared to its analog and hybrid alternatives but has the highest hardware complexity. Conventional digital beamformers at the receiver require a dedicated analog to digital converter (ADC) for every antenna element, leading to ADCs for elements. The number of ADCs is the key deterministic factor for the power consumption of an antenna array system. The digital hardware consists of fast Fourier transform (FFT) cores with a multiplier complexity of (N log2N) for an element system to generate multiple beams. It is required to reduce the mixed and digital hardware complexities in MIMO systems to reduce the cost and the power consumption, while maintaining high performance. The well-known concept has been in use for ADCs to achieve reduced complexities. An extension of the architecture to multi-dimensional domain is explored in this dissertation to implement a single port ADC to replace ADCs in an element system, using the correlation of received signals in the spatial domain. This concept has applications in conventional uniform linear arrays (ULAs) as well as in focal plane array (FPA) receivers. Our analysis has shown that sparsity in the spatio-temporal frequency domain can be exploited to reduce the number of ADCs from N to where . By using the limited field of view of practical antennas, multiple sub-arrays are combined without interferences to achieve a factor of K increment in the information carrying capacity of the ADC systems. Applications of this concept include ULAs and rectangular array systems. Experimental verifications were done for a element, 1.8 - 2.1 GHz wideband array system to sample using ADCs. This dissertation proposes that frequency division multiplexing (FDM) receiver outputs at an intermediate frequency (IF) can pack multiple (M) narrowband channels with a guard band to avoid interferences. The combined output is then sampled using a single wideband ADC and baseband channels are retrieved in the digital domain. Measurement results were obtained by employing a element, 28 GHz antenna array system to combine channels together to achieve a 75% reduction of ADC requirement. Implementation of FFT cores in the digital domain is not always exact because of the finite precision. Therefore, this dissertation explores the possibility of approximating the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) matrix to achieve reduced hardware complexities at an allowable cost of accuracy. A point approximate DFT (ADFT) core was implemented on digital hardware using radix-32 to achieve savings in cost, size, weight and power (C-SWaP) and synthesized for ASIC at 45-nm technology

Algorithms and Circuits for Analog-Digital Hybrid Multibeam Arrays

Fifth generation (5G) and beyond wireless communication systems will rely heavily on larger antenna arrays combined with beamforming to mitigate the high free-space path-loss that prevails in millimeter-wave (mmW) and above frequencies. Sharp beams that can support wide bandwidths are desired both at the transmitter and the receiver to leverage the glut of bandwidth available at these frequency bands. Further, multiple simultaneous sharp beams are imperative for such systems to exploit mmW/sub-THz wireless channels using multiple reflected paths simultaneously. Therefore, multibeam antenna arrays that can support wider bandwidths are a key enabler for 5G and beyond systems. In general, N-beam systems using N-element antenna arrays will involve circuit complexities of the order of N2. This dissertation investigates new analog, digital and hybrid low complexity multibeam beamforming algorithms and circuits for reducing the associated high size, weight, and power (SWaP) complexities in larger multibeam arrays. The research efforts on the digital beamforming aspect propose the use of a new class of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) approximations for multibeam generation to eliminate the need for digital multipliers in the beamforming circuitry. For this, 8-, 16- and 32-beam multiplierless multibeam algorithms have been proposed for uniform linear array applications. A 2.4 GHz 16-element array receiver setup and a 5.8 GHz 32-element array receiver system which use field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as digital backend have been built for real-time experimental verification of the digital multiplierless algorithms. The multiplierless algorithms have been experimentally verified by digitally measuring beams. It has been shown that the measured beams from the multiplierless algorithms are in good agreement with the exact counterpart algorithms. Analog realizations of the proposed approximate DFT transforms have also been investigated leading to low-complex, high bandwidth circuits in CMOS. Further, a novel approach for reducing the circuit complexity of analog true-time delay (TTD) N-beam beamforming networks using N-element arrays has been proposed for wideband squint-free operation. A sparse factorization of the N-beam delay Vandermonde beamforming matrix is used to reduce the total amount of TTD elements that are needed for obtaining N number of beams in a wideband array. The method has been verified using measured responses of CMOS all-pass filters (APFs). The wideband squint-free multibeam algorithm is also used to propose a new low-complexity hybrid beamforming architecture targeting future 5G mmW systems. Apart from that, the dissertation also explores multibeam beamforming architectures for uniform circular arrays (UCAs). An algorithm having N log N circuit complexity for simultaneous generation of N-beams in an N-element UCA is explored and verified

Design and Realization of Fully-digital Microwave and Mm-wave Multi-beam Arrays with FPGA/RF-SOC Signal Processing

There has been a constant increase in data-traffic and device-connections in mobile wireless communications, which led the fifth generation (5G) implementations to exploit mm-wave bands at 24/28 GHz. The next-generation wireless access point (6G and beyond) will need to adopt large-scale transceiver arrays with a combination of multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) theory and fully digital multi-beam beamforming. The resulting high gain array factors will overcome the high path losses at mm-wave bands, and the simultaneous multi-beams will exploit the multi-directional channels due to multi-path effects and improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Such access points will be based on electronic systems which heavily depend on the integration of RF electronics with digital signal processing performed in Field programmable gate arrays (FPGA)/ RF-system-on-chip (SoC). This dissertation is directed towards the investigation and realization of fully-digital phased arrays that can produce wideband simultaneous multi-beams with FPGA or RF-SoC digital back-ends. The first proposed approach is a spatial bandpass (SBP) IIR filter-based beamformer, and is based on the concepts of space-time network resonance. A 2.4 GHz, 16-element array receiver, has been built for real-time experimental verification of this approach. The second and third approaches are respectively based on Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) theory, and a lens plus focal planar array theory. Lens based approach is essentially an analog model of DFT. These two approaches are verified for a 28 GHz 800 MHz mm-wave implementation with RF-SoC as the digital back-end. It has been shown that for all proposed multibeam beamformer implementations, the measured beams are well aligned with those of the simulated. The proposed approaches differ in terms of their architectures, hardware complexity and costs, which will be discussed as this dissertation opens up. This dissertation also presents an application of multi-beam approaches for RF directional sensing applications to explore white spaces within the spatio-temporal spectral regions. A real-time directional sensing system is proposed to capture the white spaces within the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi band. Further, this dissertation investigates the effect of electro-magnetic (EM) mutual coupling in antenna arrays on the real-time performance of fully-digital transceivers. Different algorithms are proposed to uncouple the mutual coupling in digital domain. The first one is based on finding the MC transfer function from the measured S-parameters of the antenna array and employing it in a Frost FIR filter in the beamforming backend. The second proposed method uses fast algorithms to realize the inverse of mutual coupling matrix via tridiagonal Toeplitz matrices having sparse factors. A 5.8 GHz 32-element array and 1-7 GHz 7-element tightly coupled dipole array (TCDA) have been employed to demonstrate the proof-of-concept of these algorithms

Raking the Cocktail Party

We present the concept of an acoustic rake receiver---a microphone beamformer that uses echoes to improve the noise and interference suppression. The rake idea is well-known in wireless communications; it involves constructively combining different multipath components that arrive at the receiver antennas. Unlike spread-spectrum signals used in wireless communications, speech signals are not orthogonal to their shifts. Therefore, we focus on the spatial structure, rather than temporal. Instead of explicitly estimating the channel, we create correspondences between early echoes in time and image sources in space. These multiple sources of the desired and the interfering signal offer additional spatial diversity that we can exploit in the beamformer design. We present several "intuitive" and optimal formulations of acoustic rake receivers, and show theoretically and numerically that the rake formulation of the maximum signal-to-interference-and-noise beamformer offers significant performance boosts in terms of noise and interference suppression. Beyond signal-to-noise ratio, we observe gains in terms of the \emph{perceptual evaluation of speech quality} (PESQ) metric for the speech quality. We accompany the paper by the complete simulation and processing chain written in Python. The code and the sound samples are available online at \url{http://lcav.github.io/AcousticRakeReceiver/}.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, Accepted for publication in IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing (Special Issue on Spatial Audio

High Resolution Vision-Based Servomechanism Using a Dynamic Target with Application to CNC Machines

This dissertation introduces a novel three dimensional vision-based servomechanism with application to real time position control for manufacturing equipment, such as Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine tools. The proposed system directly observes the multi-dimensional position of a point on the moving tool relative to a fixed ground, thus bypassing the inaccurate kinematic model normally used to convert axis sensor-readings into an estimate of the tool position. A charge-coupled device (CCD camera) is used as the position transducer, which directly measures the current position error of the tool referenced to an absolute coordinate system. Due to the direct-sensing nature of the transducer no geometric error compensation is required. Two new signal processing algorithms, based on a recursive Newton-Raphson optimization routine, are developed to process the input data collected through digital imaging. The algorithms allow simultaneous high-precision position and orientation estimation from single readings. The desired displacement command of the tool in a planar environment is emulated, in one end of the kinematic chain, by an active element or active target pattern on a liquid-crystal display (LCD). On the other end of the kinematic chain the digital camera observes the active target and provides visual feedback information utilized for position control of the tool. Implementation is carried out on an XYθZ stage, which is position with high resolution. The introduction of the camera into the control loop yields a visual servo architecture; the dynamic problems and stability assessment of which are analyzed in depth for the case study of the single CAM- single image processing thread-configuration. Finally, two new command generation protocols are explained for full implementation of the proposed structure in real-time control applications. Command issuing resolutions do not depend upon the size of the smallest element of the grid/display being imaged, but can instead be determined in accordance with the sensor\u27s resolution

Digital acoustics: processing wave fields in space and time using DSP tools

Systems with hundreds of microphones for acoustic field acquisition, or hundreds of loudspeakers for rendering, have been proposed and built. To analyze, design, and apply such systems requires a framework that allows us to leverage the vast set of tools available in digital signal processing in order to achieve intuitive and efficient algorithms. We thus propose a discrete space-time framework, grounded in classical acoustics, which addresses the discrete nature of the spatial and temporal sampling. In particular, a short-space/time Fourier transform is introduced, which is the natural extension of the localized or short-time Fourier transform. Processing in this intuitive domain allows us to easily devise algorithms for beam-forming, source separation, and multi-channel compression, among other useful tasks. The essential space band-limitedness of the Fourier spectrum is also used to solve the spatial equalization task required for sound field rendering in a region of interest. Examples of applications are show

Otimização de soluções de fotónica integrada para sistemas óticos de nova geração

Next generation optical systems can highly benefit from optimized photonic integrated solutions. Photonic integrated circuits (PIC) appear as a promising technology under the current demand for flexibility/reconfigurability in optical systems and telecommunications networks. PIC-based optical systems offer an efficient and cost-effective solution to data transmission increasing claims. In order to contribute to the development of integrated photonic technology, optimized PIC solutions addressing different steps of the PIC development chain, mainly design, testing, and packaging processes, are investigated. Optical signal data compression techniques are progressing to sustain the fast processing/storing of large amounts of bandwidth demanding data, with the advantage of resorting to photonic integrated solutions for the implementation of optical transforms, e.g., Haar transform (HT). This demand motivated the research of an optimized PIC design solution in silicon nitride (Si3N4) based platform comprising a two-level HT network for compression, and a switching network as a framework that supplies all logical inputs of the HT network for testing/characterization purposes. Optimized design models for the multimode interference key building block structure of the PIC design solution, are proposed. Additionally, a first test and characterization of PIC solutions implementing the HT for compression applications in indium phosphide (InP) based platform and in a new organic-inorganic hybrid material were realized. Taking advantage of a tunable lattice filter dispersion compensator in Si3N4-based integrated platform, it was demonstrated a real-time extended reach PAM-4 transmission over 40 km enabled by the photonic integrated dispersion compensator, with application in data center interconnects. Under photonic integrated high-Q resonators need for accurate performance measurement, a technique based on RF calibrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and Brillouin gain measurements through Lorentzian fitting analysis were successfully attained. Finally, as technical and functional requirements of PIC demand a thorough characterization/testing to provide an accurate prediction of its performance, and current testing platforms can be expensive and have low flexibility, a proof of concept of a new soft-packaging flexible platform for photonic integrated processors and spatial division multiplexing systems, based in spatial light modulation operation principle is proposed.Os sistemas óticos de nova geração beneficiam com a otimização de fotónica integrada. Com os circuitos de fotónica integrada (PIC) avançados a surgir como uma tecnologia promissora, dentro da crescente procura por flexibilidade/ reconfigurabilidade dos sistemas óticos e redes de telecomunicações. Os sistemas óticos baseados em PIC oferecem soluções eficientes e rentáveis em resposta às necessidades crescentes de transmissão de dados. De modo a contribuir para o desenvolvimento tecnológico associado à fotónica integrada, são investigados no âmbito desta dissertação diferentes soluções otimizadas de PIC, abordando diferentes estágios do seu desenvolvimento, nomeadamente projeto/design, teste e encapsulamento. Técnicas de compressão de sinais óticos estão a progredir no sentido de apoiar a expansão de velocidade de processamento e quantidade de armazenamento com elevada largura de banda associada. São esperadas vantagens recorrendo a PIC para a implementação de transformadas óticas, e.g., transformada de Haar (HT). Esta necessidade motivou a investigação de soluções de PIC com design otimizado, desenvolvidas em plataforma integrada de nitreto de silício (Si3N4). O PIC desenhado é constituído por uma rede 2D a executar a HT para fins de compressão e uma rede de comutação para produzir todas as entradas lógicas esperadas para teste e caracterização. São propostos modelos de design otimizados para a estrutura elementar que compõe o PIC, i.e., componente de interferência multimodal. Adicionalmente, foi realizado o primeiro teste e caracterização experimental de um PIC implementando a HT para fins de compressão, numa plataforma integrada de fosfato de índio (InP) e num material orgânico-inorgânico híbrido. Tirando partido de um filtro sintonizável para compensação de dispersão, desenvolvido em plataforma integrada de Si3N4, foi demostrado um link de transmissão alargada (40 km) em modulação PAM-4, com possível aplicação em centros de processamento de dados de interconexão. A necessidade de medições precisas de desempenho para a caracterização efetiva de soluções integradas de ressoadores de elevado fator de qualidade, motivou a implementação de uma técnica de medição eficaz. Esta é baseada num interferómetro de Mach-Zehnder calibrado em rádio frequência e na realização de mediações de ganho de Brillouin por análise Lorentziana de ajuste de curva. Por fim, tendo em conta os rigorosos requisitos técnicos e funcionais associados ao teste/caracterização precisa de PIC e o facto de as atuais soluções serem dispendiosas e pouco flexíveis. Uma prova de conceito de uma nova plataforma flexível de encapsulamento por software é proposta com aplicação em processadores PIC e sistemas com multiplexagem por divisão espacial.Programa Doutoral em Telecomunicaçõe

CABE : a cloud-based acoustic beamforming emulator for FPGA-based sound source localization

Microphone arrays are gaining in popularity thanks to the availability of low-cost microphones. Applications including sonar, binaural hearing aid devices, acoustic indoor localization techniques and speech recognition are proposed by several research groups and companies. In most of the available implementations, the microphones utilized are assumed to offer an ideal response in a given frequency domain. Several toolboxes and software can be used to obtain a theoretical response of a microphone array with a given beamforming algorithm. However, a tool facilitating the design of a microphone array taking into account the non-ideal characteristics could not be found. Moreover, generating packages facilitating the implementation on Field Programmable Gate Arrays has, to our knowledge, not been carried out yet. Visualizing the responses in 2D and 3D also poses an engineering challenge. To alleviate these shortcomings, a scalable Cloud-based Acoustic Beamforming Emulator (CABE) is proposed. The non-ideal characteristics of microphones are considered during the computations and results are validated with acoustic data captured from microphones. It is also possible to generate hardware description language packages containing delay tables facilitating the implementation of Delay-and-Sum beamformers in embedded hardware. Truncation error analysis can also be carried out for fixed-point signal processing. The effects of disabling a given group of microphones within the microphone array can also be calculated. Results and packages can be visualized with a dedicated client application. Users can create and configure several parameters of an emulation, including sound source placement, the shape of the microphone array and the required signal processing flow. Depending on the user configuration, 2D and 3D graphs showing the beamforming results, waterfall diagrams and performance metrics can be generated by the client application. The emulations are also validated with captured data from existing microphone arrays.</jats:p

Signal processing with Fourier analysis, novel algorithms and applications

Fourier analysis is the study of the way general functions may be represented or approximated by sums of simpler trigonometric functions, also analogously known as sinusoidal modeling. The original idea of Fourier had a profound impact on mathematical analysis, physics and engineering because it diagonalizes time-invariant convolution operators. In the past signal processing was a topic that stayed almost exclusively in electrical engineering, where only the experts could cancel noise, compress and reconstruct signals. Nowadays it is almost ubiquitous, as everyone now deals with modern digital signals. Medical imaging, wireless communications and power systems of the future will experience more data processing conditions and wider range of applications requirements than the systems of today. Such systems will require more powerful, efficient and flexible signal processing algorithms that are well designed to handle such needs. No matter how advanced our hardware technology becomes we will still need intelligent and efficient algorithms to address the growing demands in signal processing. In this thesis, we investigate novel techniques to solve a suite of four fundamental problems in signal processing that have a wide range of applications. The relevant equations, literature of signal processing applications, analysis and final numerical algorithms/methods to solve them using Fourier analysis are discussed for different applications in the electrical engineering/computer science. The first four chapters cover the following topics of central importance in the field of signal processing: • Fast Phasor Estimation using Adaptive Signal Processing (Chapter 2) • Frequency Estimation from Nonuniform Samples (Chapter 3) • 2D Polar and 3D Spherical Polar Nonuniform Discrete Fourier Transform (Chapter 4) • Robust 3D registration using Spherical Polar Discrete Fourier Transform and Spherical Harmonics (Chapter 5) Even though each of these four methods discussed may seem completely disparate, the underlying motivation for more efficient processing by exploiting the Fourier domain signal structure remains the same. The main contribution of this thesis is the innovation in the analysis, synthesis, discretization of certain well known problems like phasor estimation, frequency estimation, computations of a particular non-uniform Fourier transform and signal registration on the transformed domain. We conduct propositions and evaluations of certain applications relevant algorithms such as, frequency estimation algorithm using non-uniform sampling, polar and spherical polar Fourier transform. The techniques proposed are also useful in the field of computer vision and medical imaging. From a practical perspective, the proposed algorithms are shown to improve the existing solutions in the respective fields where they are applied/evaluated. The formulation and final proposition is shown to have a variety of benefits. Future work with potentials in medical imaging, directional wavelets, volume rendering, video/3D object classifications, high dimensional registration are also discussed in the final chapter. Finally, in the spirit of reproducible research we release the implementation of these algorithms to the public using Github

Experimental Evaluation and Comparison of Time-Multiplexed Multi-FPGA Routing Architectures

Emulating large complex designs require multi-FPGA systems (MFS). However, inter-FPGA communication is confronted by the challenge of lack of interconnect capacity due to limited number of FPGA input/output (I/O) pins. Serializing parallel signals onto a single trace effectively addresses the limited I/O pin obstacle. Besides the multiplexing scheme and multiplexing ratio (number of inter-FPGA signals per trace), the choice of the MFS routing architecture also affect the critical path latency. The routing architecture of an MFS is the interconnection pattern of FPGAs, fixed wires and/or programmable interconnect chips. Performance of existing MFS routing architectures is also limited by off-chip interface selection. In this dissertation we proposed novel 2D and 3D latency-optimized time-multiplexed MFS routing architectures. We used rigorous experimental approach and real sequential benchmark circuits to evaluate and compare the proposed and existing MFS routing architectures. This research provides a new insight into the encouraging effects of using off-chip optical interface and three dimensional MFS routing architectures. The vertical stacking results in shorter off-chip links improving the overall system frequency with the additional advantage of smaller footprint area. The proposed 3D architectures employed serialized interconnect between intra-plane and inter-plane FPGAs to address the pin limitation problem. Additionally, all off-chip links are replaced by optical fibers that exhibited latency improvement and resulted in faster MFS. Results indicated that exploiting third dimension provided latency and area improvements as compared to 2D MFS. We also proposed latency-optimized planar 2D MFS architectures in which electrical interconnections are replaced by optical interface in same spatial distribution. Performance evaluation and comparison showed that the proposed architectures have reduced critical path delay and system frequency improvement as compared to conventional MFS. We also experimentally evaluated and compared the system performance of three inter-FPGA communication schemes i.e. Logic Multiplexing, SERDES and MGT in conjunction with two routing architectures i.e. Completely Connected Graph (CCG) and TORUS. Experimental results showed that SERDES attained maximum frequency than the other two schemes. However, for very high multiplexing ratios, the performance of SERDES & MGT became comparable