Analog Equalization for Low Power 60 GHz Receivers in Realistic Multipath Channels

Multi-gigabit per second wireless network devices are emerging for personal area networks (PAN) in the 60 GHz band. Such devices are typically power hungry, largely due to the requisite high speed analog to digital converters (ADCs) that can consume from tens to hundreds of milliwatts of power. This paper studies the use of analog equalization before the ADC to reduce the required ADC resolution. We provide a novel analysis that uses a superposition model for multipath energy and derive a closed-form expression that relates ADC resolution to the channel state, and also the bit error rate (BER) for MQAM constellations. Simulations verify that analog equalization can reduce the link bit-error rate by up to several orders of magnitude, without increasing the number of quantization bits in the ADC.