Hardware efficient approximative matrix inversion for linear pre-coding in massive MIMO

This paper describes a hardware efficient linear precoder for Massive MIMO Base Stations (BSs) comprising a very large number of antennas, say, in the order of 100s, serving multiple users simultaneously. To avoid hardware demanding direct matrix inversions required for the Zero-Forcing (ZF) precoder, we use low complexity Neumann series based approximations. Furthermore, we propose a method to speed-up the convergence of the Neumann series by using tri-diagonal precondition matrices, which lowers the complexity even further. As a proof of concept a flexible VLSI architecture is presented with an implementation supporting matrix inversion of sizes up-to 16×16. In 65 nm CMOS, a throughput of 0.5M matrix inversions per sec is achieved at clock frequency of 420MHz with a 104K gate count.