ABSTRACT: 

Utilizing the essentially unlimited bandwidth and spatial reuse at millimeter wave and THz frequencies requires the development of signal processing approaches that exploit the physics of tiny wavelengths, while accounting for hardware constraints associated with scaling bandwidth and spatial resolution. In this talk, we start with an overview of the evolution of research at UCSB in the area of millimeter wave communication and sensing, and our current efforts within a large multi-university center led by UCSB. We then provide a more detailed account of our recent work on all-digital mmWave massive MIMO.  Key observations are as follows: (1) using tiled architectures, one RF chain per antenna element is indeed possible even as we scale up the number of antenna elements, making it possible to scale up the number of simultaneous users proportionally with all-digital MIMO signal processing; (2) when we take advantage of the scale enabled by a large number of antennas, a number of hardware constraints can be relaxed, including linearity in the RF chain, phase noise specifications, and the precision of analog-to-digital conversion; (3) for the sparse channels characteristic of these bands, it is possibly to greatly simplify the MIMO signal processing required for supporting multiple simultaneous users.

BIO: 

Upamanyu Madhow is Distinguished Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His current research interests focus on next generation communication, sensing and inference infrastructures centered around millimeter wave systems, and on robust machine learning. Dr. Madhow is a recipient of the 1996 NSF CAREER award, and co-recipient of the 2012 IEEE Marconi prize paper award in wireless communications. He is the author of two textbooks published by Cambridge University Press, Fundamentals of Digital Communication (2008) and Introduction to Communication Systems (2014).  He has been heavily engaged in technology transfer of his work through industry collaborations, and as co-founder of several startups.