Inductive-Coupling Transceiver for 3D System Integration

This paper presents recent achievements of a high-bandwidth and low-energy inductive-coupling transceiver. First, a lTb/s 2.8 pJ/b transceiver in 180 nm CMOS is presented. Both clock and data are transmitted by inductive coupling at a clock rate of 1 GHz and a data rate of 1 Gb/s. 1024 data transceivers are arranged with a pitch of 30 mum in 1 mm² where 4-phase time division multiplexing (TDM) reduces crosstalk between channels. Measured bit error rate (BER) is lower than 10-¹². Second, a 0.14 pJ/b transceiver in 90 nm CMOS is presented. A digital pulse shaping reduces the transmitter´s energy dissipation to 0.11 pJ/b. Device scaling reduces the receiver´s energy dissipation to 0.03 pJ/b. The overall energy dissipation is 20X lower than the first transceiver without degrading the data rate and BER.