A Flexible Control and Calibration Architecture Using RISC-V MCU for 5G Millimeter-wave Mobile RF Transceivers

We propose an architecture for mobile RF transceivers which integrates RISC-V micro-controller unit (MCU) to control its internal function without requiring multiple chip-to-chip control messages from the modem. The proposed architecture is utilized to perform 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) control tasks including beamforming and temperature dependent gain compensation. The control architecture including MCU and its subsystem occupies 0.258 mm
²
in 28-nm process, and consumes 2.61 mW at 140 MHz (18 μW/MHz). Based on the evaluation results, our proposed architecture enables control of 5G mmWave RF transceivers.