A 13.5-Gb/s 140-GHz silicon redriver exploiting metadevices for short-range OOK communications

• Main Authors: Liang, Yuan, Boon, Chirn Chye, Zhang, Haochi, Tang, Xiao-Lan, Zhang, Qingfeng, Yu, Hao
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Integrated circuits; CMOS I/O Redriver; Crosstalk
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/156844
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The effort to confine the electromagnetic field by silicon passive metadevices has made the design of an on-chip wideband sub-terahertz (sub-THz) I/O redriver feasible, paving a new way toward energy-efficient and crosstalk-immune ON-OFF keying (OOK) communications. Two metadevices, namely spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) metawaveguide and split-ring resonator (SRR), are exploited to build the sub-THz low-crosstalk silicon channel and high-ON-OFF-ratio modulator, respectively. A sub-THz signal source combining the merit of spoof SPPs and SRR is introduced. A 140-GHz dual-channel redriver composed of these metadevices is fully integrated in a 65-nm CMOS technology. The redriver realizes both 27-1 and 231-1 13.5 Gb/s/lane for dual-channel OOK modulation. The measured energy efficiency is 2.6 pJ/bit/lane and the bit error rate (BER) is ≤10-12, demonstrating a crosstalk-immune sub-THz I/O system. The power consumption is 35.1 mW/lane and the active area of the redriver is 0.23 mm2.