A CMOS IR-UWB Transceiver Design for Contact-Less Chip Testing Applications

This paper presents a novel CMOS impulse radio (IR) ultra-wide-band (UWB) transceiver system design for future contact-less chip testing applications using inductive magnetic coupling as wireless interconnect. The proposed architecture is composed of a simple and robust design of a Gaussian monocycle impulse generator at the transmitter, a wideband short-range on-chip transformer for data transmission, and a gm-boosted common-gate low-noise amplifier in the UWB receiver path. SpectreRF post-layout simulation with a 90-nm CMOS technology shows that the transceiver operates up to a 5 Gb/s data rate, and consumes a total of 9 mW under a 1-V power supply.

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