Realizing 5G New Radio massive MIMO systems

Paul Newson, Hemang Parekh & Harpinder Matharu (Xilinx)
EDN (January 08, 2018)

16nm FinFET technology

The monolithic integration of high speed RF components benefits from the excellent analog transistor characteristics that can be wrung out of the 16nm FinFET process. The ON resistance of the transistor is extremely low, which allows implementation of wide bandwidth RF sampling signal switches with high precision. In turn this enables the integration of cost-efficient and power-efficient high speed comparators, amplifiers, clocking circuits, and digitally-assisted analog calibration logic, all with excellent characteristics.

The digital implementation in 16nm FinFET versus 65nm (typically used for analog RF components) results in more than 10× area reduction and 4× power reduction. Xilinx has innovated ideal design solutions to implement power integrity, digital calibration loops for high precision, and robust isolation strategies.

The digital-RF resources integrated in RFSoC are comprised of multiple channels of 6.4 GSPS DACs and 4 GSPS ADCs, integrated low phase noise PLLs and full complex mixers – 48-bit numerically controlled oscillators (NCO) for each DAC and ADC. The RF data converter arrays come with 1×, 2×, 4×, 8× interpolation and decimation filters and implement flexible FPGA fabric interface. In addition, the direct RF-DAC block implements quadrature modulation correction (QMC) and Sin x/x (Sinc) correction filters.

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