Celebrating Three Decades of MIMO (and Prof. Arogyaswami Paulraj’s 80th Birthday)

The concept of spatial multiplexing, which is at the heart of the technology now popularly known as MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output), originated from experiments at Stanford University in 1992, which led to a US patent application the same year, issued in September 1994.

The first papers on MIMO theory were published by researchers at Bell Labs beginning in 1997 and were soon followed by others in academia, particularly the Smart Antenna Research Group at Stanford University. In 1998, Gigabit Wireless Inc., a spin-off from Stanford, began commercializing MIMO-OFDM as an air interface technology for cellular networks. By the early 2000s, MIMO began to attract worldwide interest, with thousands of researchers from academia and industry working to advance both theory and practice. 

MIMO technology is at the core of all 4G/5G mobile and WiFi wireless networks, which now power the digital economy across the world. MIMO is a fundamental breakthrough, earning it a permanent place in all future wireless technology.

Additional information: Helen Niu, helen.niu@stanford.edu