RF Transceiver Circuit Technology Based Wireless Interconnects for Inter- and Intra-Chip Communication System

In this work, some most frequently studied interconnect solutions in recent years have been discussed and compared to show their advantages and limitations. RF wireless interconnect (RFWI) method is further studied by system modeling in simulink environment and successful communication between transmitter and receiver is obtained. The results indicate the potential feasibility and reliability of the inter-chip and intra-chip communication system using integrated RF transceiver and antenna to replace the present metal wiring interconnect. The fact that lots of the existing experiences on RF transceiver and antenna design makes RFWI an attractive interconnect solution.

I. INTRODUCTION

With the increasing integration density and operation frequency of CMOS integrated circuits in the era of sub-100nm, the traditional metal wiring interconnect technology is emerging as the major bottleneck to the performance improvement of VLSI system such as System-on-Chip (SoC), System-in-Package (SiP) and Network-on-Chip (NoC) etc. This limit is due to the global interconnection delay becoming significantly larger than the gate delay. Figure. 1 shows the relationship between gate and interconnect delay under different technology [1]. It is clear from this figure that under 0.18µm technology, interconnect delay dominates the speed performance. To address this challenge, a variety of new interconnect concepts and radical solutions have been developed during the past ten years. Fig. 1 Delay. vs. Technology Node