Wireless Inter/Intra-Chip Communication Using an Innovative PCB Channel Bounded by a Metamaterial Absorber

This letter demonstrates the feasibility of applying I/O pins as chip Tx/Rx antennas for implementing wireless inter/intra-chip communications (WIICs). An innovative printed circuit board (PCB) medium is presented as a signal propagation channel, which is specially bounded by a metamaterial electromagnetic wave absorber to improve electromagnetic environment pollution. Presented is a 20.4-GHz WIIC communication system, mainly including a transmitter and a receiver. The bit-error-rate (BER) performance of a coherent binary phase-shift keying interconnect system is evaluated. It is shown that the system performance degrades as the separation distance of the transceivers increases. A data rate of 1 Gb/s with a BER at the level of 10
^-5
on the PCB investigated is achieved for the transmitted power of 10 dBm.