XYNC

The ultimate low-cost massive MIMO SDR, with up to 32x32 transmit/receive channels

Nov 29, 2019

Project update 4 of 5

Phase Offset Stability Testing

by Alexander Chemeris

In the Synchronization & Phase Coherency section of the XYNC campaign page, we mention that "if you’re looking to do direction finding or beamforming, you would need to take the extra step of calibrating the phases between all XTRXs". Here we would like to share the results of one of our clients, who carried out such calibration as a part of the AutoAir UK5G project.

Please note that this remains a work in progress, and we expect even better results after further tuning.

Test System Specification

Below, you can see a high-level diagram of the test setup above. Both Tx channels of a single XTRX share the same PLL and are inherently phase-synchronized (typically to within 3-4 degrees). This allows us to calibrate only one channel out of each channel pair (Tx1) and apply the same correction to the other channel (Tx2).

XYNC Phase Calibration

Phase Stability Test Description

  1. The calibration signal is transmitted on the Tx1 port of each of the eight XTRX’s
  2. The signal is a CW (sine) signal with LTE FFT tone spacing, with each XTRX transmitting at a different frequency
  3. The signals are then combined and routed to the calibration receiver
  4. The calibration receiver performs FFT on the data and measures phase offset per tone over multiple test runs
  5. The phase offset for Ch 2-8 is calculated relative to a reference channel (Ch1)
  6. The XTRX array is kept running throughout the test

Test Results

Ch1Ch2Ch3Ch4Ch5Ch6Ch7Ch8
Average, deg0.63-0.09-0.10-0.11-0.11-0.11-0.100.62
STD, deg5.835.794.955.064.975.606.466.82

Phase Offsets Between XTRXs as a Function of Time


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XYNC is part of Qorvo RF Accelerator

Key Components

QPL9503TR7 · RF amlplifier

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