Rotary Coding for Power Reduction and S/N Improvement in Inductive-Coupling Data Communication

In this paper, we describe a noncontact inductive-coupling data transmission link employing rotary data encoding. A system using this data-transmission link is inherently insensitive to jitter introduced in the channel and consumes approximately 50% less power than previously reported solutions. The system is targeted for applications benefiting from simultaneous noncontact power and data transmission, such as wafer-level testing, memory card interfaces, and inter-strata data communication in 3-D integrated circuits. Functionality of the proposed link is verified experimentally with a test chip developed in an 0.18-μm CMOS process. In the second part of this paper, we introduce a design of a high-speed data transceiver using rotary coding. We demonstrate that, because of properties of the rotary coding, a simple transceiver without a PLL-based CDR circuit can operate at data rates limited only by characteristics of the physical channel. For performance optimization, we have developed a new family of ternary logic gates including latches, D-flip-flops, and multiplexers.