Aperture-Array & Lens+FPA Multi-Beam Digital Receivers at 28GHz on Xilinx ZCU 1275 RF SoC

Emerging mm-wave wireless systems will make extensive use of fully-digital beamforming receivers for achieving highly-directional RF beamformers that are needed for mitigating high path loss in the channel. Two main approaches for achieving multi-beams include aperture-arrays and lenses with focal plane array (FPA) feeds. The paper discusses the realization of 4-element aperture and FPA+lens receivers supporting four RF beams around 28 GHz with 850 MHz of bandwidth per beam. The DSP algorithms operate in real-time on a Xilinx RF SoC device installed on a Xilinx ZCU 1275 evaluation board. Simulated and measured array factors for both aperture-array and lens+FPA digital beamforming receivers are provided.