Abstract:
With the continued growth in the integration density of CMOS and clock frequency
of ultra-large-scale integrated circuits, the wire interconnects technology is emerging as the
major bottleneck to the improvement of integrated circuit (lC) technology. The
semiconductor industry has sought to address this primary problem by increasing the
thickness of the wires, using more exotic substrate materials with lower dielectric loss
tangents, and employing more sophisticated input/output drivers. However, all of these
potential solutions are costly, thereby making wireless interconnect technology an
increasingly attractive alternative. In this thesis, we have proposed a simple impulse radio
ultra wideband (lR-UWB) wireless interconnect system with integrated antennas.
transmitters, and receivers for inter-chip and intra-chip communications. To avoid
complicated inter-chip/intra-chip channel estimation methods and to reduce electronic
overhead in terms of circuit components in the receiver transmitted reference ultra
wideband (TR-UWB) signaling scheme has been incorporated in the system architecture
that provides straight-forward synchronization. Various UWB pulses have been
investigated to explore the ultimate pulse shape which satisfies the FCC regulations and
also provides the highest data transmission rate. Novel circuit topologies have been
proposed to design complete digital OOKlBPSK UWB transmitters in IBM 90nm CMOS
technology. For the transmitters, a Gaussian monocycle UWB pulse is generated using
triangular impulse generation technique with novel methodology to include TR pulse. A
differential operation has been employed to increase the maximum achievable voltage
swing and to immunize environmental noise. The circuits have been developed in an
integrated fashion with low power requirements desirable. for on-chip wireless
interconnects. The performance of the proposed transmitters has been evaluated and
compared with some other available UWB transmitters, which shows superior performance
over the conventional transmitters. The transmitters together with the on-chip dipole
antenna have been simulated to confirm the effective reception of the transmitted signal.
