Scalable pipeline architecture of MMSE MIMO detector for 4×4 MIMO-OFDM receiver

MIMO-OFDM performs signal detection on subcarrier-by-subcarrier basis and increases its computational complexity. A complete pipeline MMSE detector meeting requirements for a high throughput has been presented in our previous work, which provides real-time processing even for large numbers of subcarriers. However, it requires large circuit scale and tends to be excessive for small numbers of subcarriers. We propose a new scalable architecture to reduce circuit scale by adjusting the number of iterative operations related to OFDM parameters. The designed detector reduces to about 1/2 to 1/7 in circuit area and is superior to the conventional detectors in computation time.