Dynamic Range Requirements of Digital vs. RF and Tiled Beamforming in mm-Wave Massive MIMO

We analyze the required RF channel 1dB gain compression points and ADC resolution in mm-wave massive MIMO wireless communications hubs using RF beamformers, digital beamformers, and hybrid beamformers with coarse RF beamforming in the tiles and fine digital beamforming in the overall array. Given a 140GHz uplink, 16 users, 10Gb/s data rate per user, QPSK modulation, 5dB power levelling, and 32 or 64 RF channels, the three architectures require similar ADC resolution and similar 1dB gain-compression points, i.e. fully digital beamforming does not significantly increase the hardware requirements of the RF chain or ADC.