A plastic waveguide receiver in 40nm CMOS with on-chip bondwire antenna

This paper presents the design and measurements of a 40 nm CMOS BPSK and multilevel ASK receiver for wired connections through a plastic waveguide, operating at 87 GHz. In a measurement setup containing the receiver chip with bondwire dipole antenna and a long piece of polypropylene waveguide with a rectangular cross-section of 2.2 mm by 0.9 mm, a maximum datarate of 9 Gbit/s over a distance of 60 cm and 2.5 Gbit/s over a distance of 9 m is measured, both with a bit error rate of less than 10^-12 and a PRBS length of 2⁷ - 1. The chip consumes 50 mW of DC power from a 0.9 V supply. The total chip area is 2.1 mm², of which 52 % is occupied by the antenna and reflector.