A Millimeter-Wave Intra-Connect Solution

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 mm using bond-wire antennas with a bit error rate (BER) of less than 10^-11. The active footprint of the transmitter is 0.06 mm² and the power consumption is 29 mW with an energy usage of 6.4 pj/bit per channel. The receiver occupies the active footprint of 0.07 mm² and consumes 41 mW. The work shows the feasibility of the millimeter-wave Intra-Connect for high speed internal I/O connections.