אבסטרקט

Communication systems for short range using millimeter wave frequencies are attracting more interest in recent years since it offers the possibility of a wide spectral bandwidth that allows multi gigabits/second (Gb/s) communication links. CMOS RF transceivers are showing impressive results, using carrier frequencies of 60 GHz for Gb/s and even with higher carrier frequencies, making it a promising candidate for implementing an efficient and low-cost link. Increasing the data rate can be done using complex modulation such as quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) or quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). High order modulations are spectrally efficient and typically are more robust to multipath effects & fading conditions. Such circuits require local oscillators (LO), phase locked loops (PLLs) and mixers that require more area, power consumption and imposes speed and power constraints on the baseband circuits. For short range, point-point, applications the system requirements can be relaxed. Consequently, recent research investigates the use of simple modulation technique such as amplitude shift keying (ASK), while spectrally in efficient, results in a compact solution with very low power consumption that does not require carrier synchronization. Power constraints and efficiency are one of the top priorities in first level step system design, however a refocus on signaling and timing conventions for efficient data transactions has gradually migrated to system level design attention. One of the system bottlenecks are the on and off chip data rate. As the data rate increases, the response of the wire, whether off or on chip, change with the frequency resulting in low signal integrity and dispersion. This dispersion is more dominated in digital signals, when most of the energy is located from DC up to twice of the maximum data rate. When high frequency carrier is used, the wire inductance dominates over the resistance that allows propagation of waves in the transmission line. Close to the carrier frequency, signal loss does not change much with frequency, and wave velocity hardly changes at all. Thus, using modulation of a high frequency carrier wave makes the frequency dispersion less influential to signal integrity, even at high data rates, because the bandwidth-to-center frequency ratio is relatively small. As a result, the probability of ISI is greatly reduced even at high data rates. Following this high frequency benefit of integrity and low dispersion characteristics we investigated the use of a new low power and area cost efficient bi-directional transceiver. We first address a single band architecture for bi-directional transceivers at the E-band and W-band. We look on the system overview for adapting non-coherent ASK bi-directional transceiver to predict the required link for low bit error rate (BER). We show simulation and design considerations based on the system analysis for the Tx/Rx modes and explain how to establish a fully packaged high data rate transceiver link in mm-wave frequencies while taking into consideration the interface impact. Secondly, we investigate today’s challenges for implementing a high frequency multiplexing transceiver with a transition from chip to off-chip that can be used for wireline and wireless applications with low insertion loss and high data link capability. We introduce a novel approach of a fully packaged bi-directional dual channel transceiver design, modulating and demodulating data over 95GHz and 130GHz carriers, enabling channel capacity and data rate twice as high compared to a single channel. Separation of the channels allows concurrent transmission and reception of two data streams with minimal interference. Each channel in the DBI chip has dual operation and can be used to transmit or receive data. The E-band transceiver shows a capability for transmitting and receiving data up to 6Gbps while the W-band transceiver shows both wireline and wireless half-duplex communication link reaching up to 10Gbaud recovered   data with only 34mW power consumption, while using one band for transmitting and receiving the modulated data. The F-band transceiver shows wireline half-duplex and full-duplex communication link demonstrating up to 20Gbps wireline communication link with a maximum of 41mW power consumption.