A 210 GHz Fully-Integrated OOK Transceiver for Short-Range Wireless Chip-to-Chip Communication in 40 nm CMOS Technology

This paper presents a fully-integrated 210 GHz transceiver (TRX) with non-coherent on-off-keying (OOK) modulation for short-range multi-Gb/s wireless chip-to-chip communication in 40 nm CMOS technology. The direct detection-based receiver (RX) part comprises an on-die -0.1 dBi gain modified dipole antenna, an 8-stage 210-GHz 21.7-dB peak gain low noise amplifier (LNA) along with differential-pair neutralization technique and a 2.83-kV/W peak responsivity simple demodulator (push detector) in order to operate efficiently in THz regime. The phased-locked transmitter (TX) consists of a 210 GHz -1.3 dBm output power 3.8% locking-range phased-locked loop (PLL), two modified cascode transistors as a simple OOK modulator, a 4-stage 210-GHz 19.4-dB peak power gain power amplifier (PA) with neutralization and especially layout enhancement techniques and a similar modified on-die dipole antenna. The implemented PLL employs a triple-push circular-geometry voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) followed by a divider chain (÷1024). The proposed TRX achieved error-free operation with +6.8 dBm of EIRP at center frequency of 210 GHz with 2³¹-1 PRBS of 10.7 Gb/s data-rate over 1 cm distance while consuming 421 mW of DC power which results to energy efficiency of 39.3 pJ/bit.