Design of a UWB transmitter with integrated antenna for on - chip RF wireless interconnects

Abstract

With the continued growth in the integration density of CMOS and clock frequency of ultra-large-scale integrated circuits, the wire interconnects technology is emerging as the major bottleneck to the improvement of integrated circuit (lC) technology. The semiconductor industry has sought to address this primary problem by increasing the thickness of the wires, using more exotic substrate materials with lower dielectric loss tangents, and employing more sophisticated input/output drivers. However, all of these potential solutions are costly, thereby making wireless interconnect technology an increasingly attractive alternative. In this thesis, we have proposed a simple impulse radio ultra wideband (lR-UWB) wireless interconnect system with integrated antennas. transmitters, and receivers for inter-chip and intra-chip communications. To avoid complicated inter-chip/intra-chip channel estimation methods and to reduce electronic overhead in terms of circuit components in the receiver transmitted reference ultra wideband (TR-UWB) signaling scheme has been incorporated in the system architecture that provides straight-forward synchronization. Various UWB pulses have been investigated to explore the ultimate pulse shape which satisfies the FCC regulations and also provides the highest data transmission rate. Novel circuit topologies have been proposed to design complete digital OOKlBPSK UWB transmitters in IBM 90nm CMOS technology. For the transmitters, a Gaussian monocycle UWB pulse is generated using triangular impulse generation technique with novel methodology to include TR pulse. A differential operation has been employed to increase the maximum achievable voltage swing and to immunize environmental noise. The circuits have been developed in an integrated fashion with low power requirements desirable. for on-chip wireless interconnects. The performance of the proposed transmitters has been evaluated and compared with some other available UWB transmitters, which shows superior performance over the conventional transmitters. The transmitters together with the on-chip dipole antenna have been simulated to confirm the effective reception of the transmitted signal.