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This paper presents a two-layer RF/analog weighting MIMO transceiver that comprises fully-connected (FC) multi-stream beamforming tiles in the RF-domain first layer, followed by a fully connected analog- or digital-domain baseband layer. The architecture mitigates the complexity versus spectral-efficiency tradeoffs of existing hybrid MIMO architectures and enables MIMO stream/user scalability, superior energy-efficiency, and spatial-processing flexibility. Moreover, multi-layer architectures with FC tiles inherently enable the co-existence of MIMO with carrier-aggregation and full-duplex beamforming. A compact, reconfigurable bidirectional circuit architecture is introduced, including a new Cartesian-combining/splitting beamforming receiver/transmitter, dual-band bidirectional beamforming network, dual-band frequency translation chains, and baseband Cartesian beamforming with an improved programmable gain amplifier design. A 28/37 GHz band, two-layer, eight-element, four-stream (with two FC-tiles) hybrid MIMO transceiver prototype is designed in 65-nm CMOS to demonstrate the above features. The prototype achieves accurate beam/null-steering capability, excellent area/power efficiency, and state-of-the-art TX/RX mode performance in two simultaneous bands while demonstrating multi-antenna (up to eight) multi-stream (up to four) over-the-air spatial multiplexing operation using proposed energy-efficient two-layer hybrid beamforming scheme.
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