Silicon Differential Antenna/Inductor for Short Range Wireless Communication Applications

The on-chip antenna concept is a practical solution to compact, small size and low cost transceivers for short range wireless applications like RFID tags and biomedical sensor data transmitters. Here we present a miniature on-chip antenna design in a 0.13 mum CMOS process which also serves as the inductor. The optimized on-chip inductor/antenna has a Q of 9.2, inductance of 2.0 nH and an omni-directional radiation pattern with a gain of -22 dB on a lossy silicon substrate. The same inductor/antenna design is used in both the transmitter and the receiver circuits, leading to a communication range of 25 cm in air. This paper also presents a simple lumped model extraction technique for the on-chip differential inductors