A 6-Gb/s Wireless Inter-Chip Data Link Using 43-GHz Transceivers and Bond-Wire Antennas

Abstract

Abstract-A 43-GHz wireless inter-chip data link including antennas, transmitters, and receivers is presented. The industry standard bonding wires are exploited to provide high efficiency and low-cost antennas. This type of antennas can provide an efficient horizontal communication which is hard to achieve using conventional on-chip antennas. The system uses binary amplitude shift keying (ASK) modulation to keep the design compact and power efficient. The transmitter includes a differential to single-ended modulator and a two-stage power amplifier (PA). The receiver includes a low-noise amplifier (LNA), pre-amplifiers, envelope detectors (ED), a variable gain amplifier (VGA), and a comparator. The chip is fabricated in 180-nm SiGe BiCMOS technology. With power-efficient transceivers and low-cost high-performance antennas, the implemented inter-chip link achieves bit-error rate (BER) around 10 8 for 6 Gb/s over a distance of 2 cm. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the recovered signal is about 24 dB with 18 ps of rms jitter. The transmitter and receiver consume 57 mW and 60 mW, respectively, including buffers. The bit energy efficiency excluding test buffers is 17 pJ/bit. The presented work shows the feasibility of a low power high data rate wireless inter-chip data link and wireless heterogeneous multi-chip networks.Index Terms-Bond-wire antenna, high-speed link, on-chip antenna, wirebond antenna, wireless inter-chip link, wireless transceiver.

Status of development of technology for wireless data transfer in future tracking detectors

“…This gives a energy per transmitted bit around 40 pJ/bit. For comparison , Figure 3 and distance between TX and RX (right) for transceivers produced in CMOS, GaAs and SiGe [3], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18].…”

On the Area and Energy Scalability of Wireless Network-on-Chip: A Model-Based Benchmarked Design Space Exploration

“…In this context, the concept of on-chip antenna becomes a possibility since an antenna of a few millimeters in size is able to radiate at these frequencies [13]. Also, transceivers suited to the needs of the wireless chip communications have been developed: a wide variety of millimeter-wave implementations can be found in the literature covering many alternatives in terms of technology generation, modulation or transceiver architecture [25]- [30]. For transmission ranges of up to a few centimeters, these provide high multigigabit data rates and it is expected that these figures will keep increasing as technology evolves.…”

“…This way, a rough estimate of the area and energy efficiency of future wireless transceivers can be obtained. Figure 4 shows the maturity factor of several state-of-theart transceivers [25]- [30], [41]- [44], [53] as a function of their frequency. We observe factors of up to 35% at the 60 GHz band followed by a decrease below 5% when reaching sub-THz frequencies.…”

“…4. Maturity factor as a function of the operation frequency of the transceiver for proposals [25]- [29], [41]- [44], [53].…”

High-Efficiency Micromachined Sub-THz Channels for Low-Cost Interconnect for Planar Integrated Circuits

“…Wireless chip-to-chip communication, demonstrated in [7]- [10], suffers from large losses. For example, the path loss is greater than 40.9 dB with 40-mm distance at 260 GHz [7] and 66 dB with 1-m distance at 45 GHz [8].…”