A Millimeter-Wave Intra-Connect Solution

Abstract

A novel millimeter-wave Intra-Connect solution for short range, high speed, internal I/O connections in low-power logic 40 nm CMOS process is demonstrated. The system consists of a transmitter and a receiver that uses binary amplitude shift keying (ASK) modulation for a compact and power efficient design. The receiver realizes coherent demodulation using injection locking without a PLL or an external reference clock utilizing a path to inject the received signal into the VCO. The demonstrator achieves 11 Gb/s ASK data transmission over 14 <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$~$</tex></formula> mm using bond-wire antennas with a bit error rate (BER) of less than 10 <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$^{-11}$</tex></formula> . The active footprint of the transmitter is 0.06 mm <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$^2$</tex></formula> and the power consumption is 29 mW with an energy usage of 6.4 <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$~$</tex> </formula> pJ/bit per channel. The receiver occupies the active footprint of 0.07 <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$~$</tex></formula> mm <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$^2$</tex></formula> and consumes 41 mW. The work shows the feasibility of the millimeter-wave Intra-Connect for high speed internal I/O connections.