Performance of Intra-Chip Wireless Interconnect Using On-Chip Antennas and UWB Radios

An intra-chip wireless interconnects system using on-chip antennas and an Ultra-WideBand (UWB) radio that operates in 22 - 29 GHz is studied in this paper. The on-chip antennas are meander monopoles of axial length 1 mm in silicon technology. A unique wireless channel is formed between a pair of on-chip transmit and receive antennas. The channel is characterized up to an interconnect distance of 40 mm. The system performance is evaluated in terms of Bit-Error-Rate (BER) under the assumptions of perfect system synchronization and signal corruption from thermal and switching noises. As expected, the system performance degrades with interconnect distance and data rate.