Low-Resolution to the Rescue of All-Digital Massive MIMO

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) will be a core technology of future millimeter-wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) wireless communication systems. The idea of massive MIMO is to equip the basestation with hundreds of antenna elements in order to serve tens of users in the same time-frequency resource. While this technology enables high spectral efficiency via fine-grained beamforming, naïve implementations of all-digital basestation architectures with conventional data converters for each antenna element would result in excessively high system costs, power consumption, and interconnect data rates. This fact is further aggravated at mmWave/THz frequencies due to the extremely large bandwidths available for communication. In this talk, we demonstrate that reliable wideband communication is practically feasible with all-digital basestation architectures when combining low-resolution data converters with low-resolution baseband processing and sophisticated signal processing algorithms.

Christoph Studer

Associate Professor, ETH Zurich on April 23, 2021 at 10:00 AM in Zoom Webinar
Join Zoom Webinar

Christoph Studer received his Ph.D. degree in 2009 from ETH Zurich, and from 2009 to 2013 he was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich and at Rice University. From 2014 to 2019, Dr. Studer was an Assistant Professor at Cornell University in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. From 2019 to 2020, he was an Associate Professor at Cornell University and Cornell Tech in New York City. Since June 2020, he has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich. Since 2014, Dr. Studer has been an Adjunct Professor at Rice University. Dr. Studer’s research interests are at the intersection of communication theory, signal processing, machine learning, and application-specific integrated circuit design. He received ETH Medals for his M.S. and Ph.D. theses, a two-year Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship for Advanced Researchers, and a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He has won several best-paper and live demonstration awards at international conferences, and he has received the Swisscom/ICTnet Innovations Award twice.

This lecture series features exciting and dynamic visiting and virtual speakers from across the range of ECE disciplines. Take some time every Friday morning to be inspired by these great scientists and engineers before heading into the weekend!