Welcome to the MATE home page!

Here we present our mm-wave testbed, MATE. MATE operates between 28 – 31 GHz, with 1 GHz analog bandwidth per transmitter or receiver. MATE supports up to 18 channels, with up to 16 transmitters and up to 9 receivers. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are available at each individual transmitter or receiver. The RF frontend is fully independent of the baseband hardware and software, thus can be replaced by other RF hardware, enabling different frequency bands.

The RF hardware is constructed from off-the-shelf components, supports >1 GHz analog bandwidth and operates between 28-31 GHz. To enable digital beamforming and MIMO signal processing, each TX chain of the system has to be coherent with respect to the other TX chains. To reach this goal we distribute a local oscillator (LO) signal to each of the TX chains. Note that if there is more than one RX, we employ a similar LO distribution for the RX as well. The LO signals drive IQ modulators, where the baseband I and Q signals are provided by 1.25 GS/s DACs. After the IQ modulator a bandpass filter is applied. The signal here can be connected to an antenna. To allow for larger distances, a power amplifier can be inserted. The RX chain is similar to the TX chains, one exception is that we use a direct IQ downconverter IC with integrated x2 LO multiplier. The downconvertor IC contains a low noise amplifier and gives out the downconverted I and Q, which are subsequently amplified, filtered and digitized by 1.5 GS/s ADCs.

The development of MATE has started in January 2015 initiated by Thomas Eriksson and Koen Buisman. New improvements and functionality are constantly added.