Effects of hardware bit width on the performance of 802.11n receiver

Bit width is a limitation of hardware implementation in baseband signal processing. It influences bit error rate (BER) performance and hardware complexity. This paper investigates BER performance of various bit width. We analyze bit width errors that come from quantization errors and clipping errors. As a result, it is shown that increasing bit width improves BER performance. At some point, increasing bit width does not enhance BER performance. This paper provides direction to determine optimum bit width value for 802.11n receiver design.