Circuit-Aware System Design Techniques for Wireless Communication

When designing wireless communication systems, many hardware details are hidden from the algorithm designer, especially with analog hardware. While it is difficult for a designer to understand all aspects of a complex system, some knowledge of circuit constraints can improve system performance by relaxing design constraints. The specifications of a circuit design are generally not equally difficult to meet, allowing excess margin in one area to be used to relax more difficult design constraints. We first propose an uplink/downlink architecture for a network with a multiple antenna central server. This design takes advantage of the central server to allow the nodes to achieve multiplexing gain by forming virtual arrays without coordination, or diversity gain to decrease SNR requirements. Computation and memory are offloaded from the nodes to the server, allowing less complex, inexpensive nodes to be used. We can further use this SNR margin to reduce circuit area and power consumption, sacrificing system capacity for circuit optimization. Besides the more common trans