Channel Estimation and Equalization Design with SNR Decision Based Universal Threshold for Sub-THz Single Carrier Baseband Receiver

In this paper, a Golay-correlator SNR decision based universal threshold (GC-SNR-UT) method for channel estimation with frequency domain equalizer (FDE) in sub-THz band is proposed. The SNR decision based universal threshold denoising method combines the SNR decision mechanism with the threshold for mean square error optimization (TMSE) and the universal threshold formula. The simulation environment incorporates channel effect based on IEEE 802.15.3d standard and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). By implementing the proposed SNR decision based universal threshold (SNR-UT) denoising method, the computational complexity can be reduced by about 50% compared to the two-stage universal threshold, and non-linear operations are not required. Furthermore, it improves the required SNR by about 0.9 dB at the uncoded BER requirement of 1.9 ×10^-4 compared to results without any noise mitigation. Notably, it provides about a 2.2 dB margin to handle other non-ideal effects. In the hardware implementation, we use the TSMC 16 nm FinFET process to achieve a data transmission with a bandwidth of 3.52 GHz. The core area and power are 0.142 mm² and 654.2 mW, respectively for the proposed design.