  One of the basic aspects of Massive MIMO (MaMi) that is in the focus of
current investigations is its potential of using low-cost and energy-efficient
hardware. It is often claimed that MaMi will allow for using analog-to-digital
converters (ADCs) with very low resolutions and that this will result in
overall improvement of energy efficiency. In this contribution, we perform a
parametric energy efficiency analysis of MaMi uplink for the entire base
station receiver system with varying ADC resolutions. The analysis shows that,
for a wide variety of system parameters, ADCs with intermediate bit resolutions
(4 - 10 bits) are optimal in energy efficiency sense, and that using very low
bit resolutions results in degradation of energy efficiency.
