A 13.5-Gb/s 140-GHz Silicon Redriver Exploiting Metadevices for Short-Range OOK Communications
Yuan Liang, Chirn Chye Boon, Hao Chi Zhang, Xiaolan Tang, Qingfeng Zhang, Hao Yu
Abstract
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 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">7</sup> –1 and 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">31</sup> –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 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−12</sup> , 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 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .