The PE188200 is an 8-channel beamforming front-end for 5G applications. It is organized as two independently controllable RF chains of four channels supporting four dual-polarity antennas or eight single-polarity antennas. Time division duplex (TDD) mode operation switches power amplifier/low noise amplifier (PA/LNA) branches connected to each antenna port. Integrated splitter/combiners and a phase and amplitude beamformer for each channel complete each chain.
All control is performed via a 4-wire serial peripheral interface (SPI) bus. On-chip memory holds 512 sets of 8-channel beamforming coefficients. These sets may be allocated in any way between RX and Tx. To enable rapid beam steering, each stored value can be selected by a short two-byte Beam Preset command, or individual beamformer coefficients may be written separately by ordinary write register commands. Similarly, on-chip storage is provided for up to 32 state modes, providing control of all amplifiers and switches for each channel. This allows flexible definition of modes such as RX, TX, idle and sleep. The desired state mode is selected by a one-byte Mode Preset command. Mode lookup tables are read from and written to via the SPI bus like ordinary registers.
The SPI bus supports pass-through operation to control several chips on the same bus for ease of multi-chip control in large antenna arrays.
