A Narrowband Fully-Analog Multi-Antenna Transmitter
For wireless transmitter designers, this work provides a power-efficient analog alternative to digital beamforming, though limited to narrowband operation and small arrays.
The paper proposes a narrowband fully-analog multi-antenna transmitter that uses only phase-control elements to synthesize arbitrary complex excitation vectors, achieving up to 16 antennas with significant RF-front-end power savings compared to fully-digital arrays.
This paper proposes a narrowband fully-analog $N$-antenna transmitter that emulates the functionality of a narrowband fully-digital $N$-antenna transmitter. Specifically, in symbol interval $m$, the proposed fully-analog transmitter synthesizes an arbitrary complex excitation vector $\boldsymbol{x}[m]\in\mathbb{C}^N$ with prescribed total power $\|\boldsymbol{x}[m]\|_2^2=P$ from a single RF tone, using only tunable phase-control elements embedded in a passive interferometric programmable network. The programmable network is excited through one input port while the remaining $N-1$ input ports are impedance matched. In the ideal lossless case, the network transfer is unitary and therefore redistributes RF power among antenna ports without dissipative amplitude control. The synthesis task is posed as a unitary state-preparation problem: program a unitary family so that $\boldsymbol{V}(\boldsymbolφ[m])\boldsymbol{e}_1=\boldsymbol{c}[m]$, where $\boldsymbol{c}[m]=\boldsymbol{x}[m]/\sqrt{P}$ and $\|\boldsymbol{c}[m]\|_2=1$. We provide a parameter-minimal realization and a closed-form programming rule: a balanced binary magnitude-splitting tree allocates the desired per-antenna magnitudes $|c_n|$ using $N-1$ tunable split ratios, and a per-antenna output phase bank assigns the target phases using $N$ tunable phase shifts. The resulting architecture uses exactly $2N-1$ real tunable degrees of freedom and admits a deterministic $O(N)$ programming procedure with no iterative optimization, enabling symbol-by-symbol updates. Using representative COTS components, we model the compute-excluded RF-front-end DC power of the proposed fully-analog transmitter and compare it against an equivalent COTS fully-digital array. For $N\le 16$, the comparison indicates significant RF-front-end power savings for the fully-analog architecture under a common delivered antenna-port power normalization.