Prospect of the VLSI Architecture for Massive MIMO Detection

With respect to the manufacturing industry, in the 5G times, apart from intelligent terminals, the background network equipment of the 5G technology will encounter revolutionary changes as well. In this era, the network equipment manufacturing industry is no longer proprietary for conventional communications equipment manufacturers. Manufacturers who provide open computation equipment, storage equipment, and network equipment can also participate in the competition. To satisfy both the scalability and ultra-low delay requirements of computing capability on terminal devices, the new rising mobile edge computing (MEC) technology emerges as a promising paradigm in 5G communications. The basic thought of MEC is to offload cloud computing platform to the edge of mobile access network to enable the user equipment to offload computation tasks to the nodes at the edge of network, which is beneficial for 5G services to fulfill technical indicators such as ultra-low delay, ultra-high energy efficiency, and ultra-high reliability. This chapter probes into the future application scenarios and hardware development from three aspects: server, mobile terminal, and edge computing, which correspond to the subsequent sections.