Full-duplex radio built on CMOS

29 April 2015 Telecoms, Datacoms, Wireless, IoT News Electronics Technology

A team of engineering researchers at New York’s Columbia University has figured out a way to carry out full-duplex wireless transmission, over a single frequency band, via a nano-scale CMOS chip.

They presented their work at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco in February.

CoSMIC (short for Columbia high-Speed and Mm-wave IC), as it has been called by the team led by Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Harish Krishnaswamy, aims to overturn the conventional wisdom that transmitters and receivers either work at different times, or at the same time but at different frequencies.

In the era of Big Data, the current frequency spectrum crisis is one of the biggest challenges researchers are grappling with and it is clear that today’s wireless networks will not be able to support tomorrow’s data deluge. Current standards, such as 4G/LTE, already support 40 different frequency bands, and there is no space left at radio frequencies for future expansion. At the same time, the grand challenge of the next-generation 5G network is to increase data capacity by 1000 times.

In this context, the ability to have a transmitter and receiver re-use the same frequency has the potential to immediately double the data capacity of today’s networks. Krishnaswamy notes that other research groups and startup companies have demonstrated the theoretical feasibility of simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency, but no one has yet been able to build tiny nanoscale ICs with this capability.

The biggest challenge the team faced with full duplex was cancelling the transmitter’s echo or self-interference. CoSMIC technology accomplishes this by implementing an echo canceller at the receiver’s input port, allowing it to cancel transmitter self-interference with one part per billion accuracy.

This innovation is “a game-changer,” according to Krishnaswamy: “By leveraging our new technology, networks can effectively double the frequency spectrum resources available for devices like smartphones and tablets,” he enthuses. The next step planned by the research team is to test a number of full-duplex nodes to understand what the gains are at the network level.

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