A 1070 pJ/b 169 Mb/s Quad-core Digital Baseband SoC for Distributed and Cooperative Massive MIMO in 28 nm FD-SOI

A 2.2 mm2 full digital baseband SoC with four heterogeneous cores for 128-node 8-users distributed massive MIMO is presented. Two specialized DSPs perform rapid over-the-air synchronization within 0.1ms. A highly optimized 8-complex lane MIMO vector processor provides 4x hardware efficiency improvement over general-purpose processors. Circuit optimizations and the use of body-bias result in 1070 pJ/b measured energy at 169 Mb/s detection rate.