Breaking the Barriers of Sub-Terahertz Communications: A Low-Complexity Signal Processing Perspective

Fifth-generation (5G) wireless systems are deployed with a symbiosis of microwave (1 to 6 GHz) and millimeter-wave (24 to 29 GHz) frequencies. The continuing trend of moving up in carrier frequencies has received significant attention. Researchers are now looking into the prospect of utilizing sub-terahertz bands (100 to 300 GHz), where tens of GHz of bandwidths are available.
However, migration to the 100-300 GHz band is a complex task, giving rise to unencountered challenges. Fundamentally, little is known about the performance limits of radio transceivers, and its associated signal processing architectures. In this application, we propose to investigate low-complexity, low-energy spectrally efficient signal processing architectures for sub-terahertz systems. The project is divided in four work packages: 1) An optimization of the end-to-end spectral and
energy efficiency of sub-terahertz systems through reduced power consumption, complexity and implementation cost; 2) Design, fabricate and test sub-array-based architectures; 3) An investigation into one-bit analog-to-digital signal processing by developing efficient resource allocation and channel estimation techniques; 4) Development of low-complexity compensation methods to mitigate the effects of non-linear quantization and I/Q imbalance. Such an investigation would enable both the development of theoretical building blocks of low-complexity sub-terahertz signal processing and drive unique measurement-based research.