Systematic Evaluation of a Sub-Terahertz CMOS Wireless Link with an Interposer-based Mushroom Antenna in a Heterogeneous Technology
Guangyu Zhong, Zhikai Li, Yiqian Shan, Yuan Liang, Jin Wen, Ke Yang
Abstract
Direct wafer bonding with silicon interposer have become one of the potential candidates for establishing a wafer-level and low-cost packaging platforms, enabling wideband and low loss radio frequency to sub-terahertz 3-D heterogeneous integration for realizing inter/intrachip interconnects and high-speed wireless link. With this emerging technique, this article evaluates a systematic wireless link with a silicon-based antenna and a CMOS transceiver. The antenna is featured by a distributed mushroom structure using interposers to establish various resonances for bandwidth extension, achieving 76% radiation efficiency with 7.2dBi gain. The CMOS transceiver mainly consists of a two-path power combined power amplifier (PA) and a cascaded two-stages frequency synthesizer. All components have been designed and optimized at 140GHz. Preliminary study and simulation results have shown that the wireless link can communicate up to 50Gb/s with clear eye opening evaluated at the receiver.