Tile-based massively scalable MIMO and phased arrays for 5G/B5G-enabled smart skins and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces

Xuanke He,Manos M Tentzeris,Yepu Cui

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-06096-9

Xuanke He, Manos M Tentzeris + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-06096-9

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Journal: Scientific Reports	Publication Date: Feb 17, 2022
Citations: 8	License type: open-access

Affiliation: Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract

This work presents a novel tile based approach to constructing, in a modular fashion, massively scalable MIMO and phased arrays for 5G/B5G millimeter-wave smart skins and large-area reconfigurable intelligent surfaces for Smart Cities and IoT applications. A proof-of-concept 29 GHz 32 elements phased array utilizing 2 times 2 “8-element subarray” tiles was fabricated and measured and demonstrates +/- 30beamsteering capability. The unique benefits of the proposed tile approach utilizes the fact that tiles of identical sizes can be manufactured in large quantities rather than have arrays of multiple sizes serve various user capacity coverage areas. It has to be stressed that the proof-of-concept flexible 2 times 2 tile array features no performance degradation when it is wrapped around a 3.5 cm radius curvature. This topology can be easily scaled up to massively large arrays by simply adding more tiles and extending the feeding network on the mounting tiling layer. The tiles are assembled onto a single flexible substrate which interconnects the RF, DC and digital traces, allowing for the easy realization of on-demand very large antenna arrays on virtually any practical conformal platform for frequencies up to sub-THz frequency range.

Highlights

The telecommunications industry has been rapidly transitioning to 5G standards for faster, higher capacity and lower latency communications
The flexible, conformal tile architecture consists of two parts, an arbitrary number of tiles, each one of which includes an antenna subarray and an integrated beamforming IC, and an underlying tiling layer to seemlessly interconnect the tiles into very large antenna arrays and MIMOs
A novel tile-based approach enabling the modular realization of massively scalable MIMO and phased arrays for 5G/B5G millimeter-wave smart skins and large-area Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) for Smart Cities and IoT applications was introduced in this paper

Summary

Introduction

The telecommunications industry has been rapidly transitioning to 5G standards for faster, higher capacity and lower latency communications. A proof-of-concept prototype of a 2 × 2 tile-based configuration, “8 element subarray”-tile configuration realizing a 32 antenna element antenna array onto a flexible tiling layer is presented and measured at typical 5G millimeter-wave frequencies.

Results

Conclusion