Contactless Heterogeneous 3-D ICs for Smart Sensing Systems

Abstract

A heterogeneous contactless transceiver circuit is designed to provide inter-tier signalling for a 3-D system considering specific bonding constraints. The system is composed of two tiers, a 65 nm processing tier and a 0.35 µm sensing tier. Face-to-back integration is chosen to support fluidic sensing. Half duplex communication between the tiers is provided through inductive links. Each tier is considered to be fabricated in a different technology to enable low manufacturing cost and benefit from the advantages each technology offers. Both the uplink and downlink transceivers achieve data rates that reach 1 Gbps with non-return-to-zero data encoding. Energy efficiency is the predominant objective, with the uplink dissipating 5.28 pJ/b and 8.67 pJ/b for the downlink. A 6.8× power reduction is demonstrated when using heterogeneous technologies, compared to a state-of-the-art 0.35 µm transceiver, while the dissipated energy is decreased by 37.5% as compared to a state-of-the-art 65 nm transceiver. Process variation analysis is also performed to ensure the proposed circuit operates correctly across several process corners, covering a broad design space. To improve system robustness, an overhead of 2.3% on the peak power and < 1% on the average power is shown, respectively.

Proximity Wireless Communication Technologies: An Overview and Design Guidelines

“…In this case, the BER of the inductive coupling communication is less than 10 −15 with the low energy efficiency of 1pJ/b, which is comparable to the performance of wired communication (Table I). Similar discussions can be seen in [15], [18], and [20]. Note that pJ/b is commonly used as a metric to compare the energy efficiency of PWC [12], even though the connection distances are different.…”

“…To overcome these challenges, PWC is being investigated as a wireless 3D integration technology [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32] as described in Sec. I.…”

“…Furthermore, the couplers can be formed in existing metal layers without requiring special processing steps, resulting in low manufacturing cost and high reliability. While a lot of initial research was focused on capacitive coupling communication technology for 2.5 and 3D integration [2], [3], inductive coupling technology was later developed to overcome challenges faced by capacitive coupling and to enable more chips to be integrated with higher stacking density [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32].…”

A Spike-Latency Transceiver With Tunable Pulse Control for Low-Energy Wireless 3-D Integration

“…When considering the context of the IoT, each of the 3D integration approaches that have been discussed (F2F stacking, 3D SiP assembly, and F2B stacking using TSVs) have associated drawbacks (stack-height, cost, and process availability respectively). Motivated by addressing these drawbacks, more recent research has looked to the use of Inductive Coupling Links (ICLs) to provide low-cost, highly reliable vertical integration at any technology node [4]. Fig.…”

Design of Intelligent Perception Module Based on Wireless Sensor Network and Basketball Sports Attitude

“…Reference [16] proposed an association graphbased mechanism to identify abnormal activities in home environments, but since this mechanism ignores activity duration information, it only works well in specific settings. Reference [17] proposed an abnormal activity detection means based on a simple transducer, but this means also did not consider the effect of duration on the model establishment, and the accuracy decreased to a certain extent. Reference [18] proposed a detailed classification scheme for the swimming propulsion mode of fish according to the different body parts used for swimming propulsion.…”