Area-efficient integrated antennas for inter-chip communication

This work discusses the design and the experimental verification of integrated on-chip antennas. The antennas use the CMOS ground supply metallisation layer as radiating elements, therefore the additional chip area required by the antenna is minimised. This has been achieved by dividing the top CMOS metallisation layer into patches and feeding the RF signals across the slots. If the carrier frequency for the wireless chip-to-chip link is chosen high enough, such antennas operate as slot antennas. The simulation results have been verified by an experimental prototype of the proposed structures.

[1]  P. Schvan,et al.  Algorithmic Design of CMOS LNAs and PAs for 60-GHz Radio , 2007, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[2]  K.K. O,et al.  Characteristics of integrated dipole antennas on bulk, SOI, and SOS substrates for wireless communication , 1998, Proceedings of the IEEE 1998 International Interconnect Technology Conference (Cat. No.98EX102).

[3]  Chih-Ming Hung,et al.  Intra-chip wireless interconnect for clock distribution implemented with integrated antennas, receivers, and transmitters , 2002, IEEE J. Solid State Circuits.

[4]  Peter Russer,et al.  Wireless inter-chip and intra-chip communication , 2009, 2009 European Microwave Conference (EuMC).

[5]  M.-Y. Li,et al.  Broadband coplanar waveguide-coplanar strip-fed spiral antenna , 1995 .

[6]  Peter Russer,et al.  Integrated on-chip antennas using CMOS ground planes , 2010 .

[7]  Changhua Cao,et al.  A 140-GHz fundamental mode voltage-controlled oscillator in 90-nm CMOS technology , 2006, IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters.

[8]  R. Jacob Baker,et al.  CMOS Circuit Design, Layout, and Simulation , 1997 .

[9]  Peter Russer,et al.  Electromagnetics, Microwave Circuit, And Antenna Design for Communications Engineering, Second Edition (Artech House Antennas and Propagation Library) , 2006 .

[10]  S. B. Cohn,et al.  Slot Line on a Dielectric Substrate , 1969 .

[11]  P. Russer.  Si and SiGe millimeter-wave integrated circuits , 1998 .

[12]  A. Sugavanam,et al.  On-chip antennas in silicon ICs and their application , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[13]  P. Russer,et al.  Integrated on-chip antennas for chip-to-chip communication , 2008, 2008 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium.

[14]  A. Alarcón,et al.  FUNDAMENTALS , 2000, Springer Monographs in Mathematics.

[15]  Peter Russer,et al.  Computation of the impulse response and coding gain of a digital interconnection bus , 2008 .