  Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are cellular networks
where the base stations (BSs) are equipped with unconventionally many antennas,
deployed on co-located or distributed arrays. Huge spatial degrees-of-freedom
are achieved by coherent processing over these massive arrays, which provide
strong signal gains, resilience to imperfect channel knowledge, and low
interference. This comes at the price of more infrastructure; the hardware cost
and circuit power consumption scale linearly/affinely with the number of BS
antennas $N$. Hence, the key to cost-efficient deployment of large arrays is
low-cost antenna branches with low circuit power, in contrast to today's
conventional expensive and power-hungry BS antenna branches. Such low-cost
transceivers are prone to hardware imperfections, but it has been conjectured
that the huge degrees-of-freedom would bring robustness to such imperfections.
We prove this claim for a generalized uplink system with multiplicative
phase-drifts, additive distortion noise, and noise amplification. Specifically,
we derive closed-form expressions for the user rates and a scaling law that
shows how fast the hardware imperfections can increase with $N$ while
maintaining high rates. The connection between this scaling law and the power
consumption of different transceiver circuits is rigorously exemplified. This
reveals that one can make the circuit power increase as $\sqrt{N}$, instead of
linearly, by careful circuit-aware system design.
