Highly-scalable (hybrid-) beam-forming RF-receiver architecture – ScaledRX

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Friedel Gerfers
• Subject Area: Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556198567

This research project investigates architectural advances required for future energy-efficient large-scale (hybrid) beam-forming RF and mm-Wave transceivers enabling significant power consumption and silicon area savings while providing highest data rates, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and bit error rate (BER) Beyond, thanks to the small footprint per beam-forming channel, the suggested sampled beam-forming techniques enable single-chip integration of large NxN-segment beam-forming antenna arrays (N >> 2) while maintaining full beam-forming flexibility. To further improve the systems area and power efficiency, we propose an innovative extension to the pipeline ADC functionality by incorporating multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) operation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants