A bidirectional lens-free digital-bits-in/-out 0.57mm2 Terahertz nano-radio in CMOS with 49.3mW peak power consumption supporting 50cm Internet-of-Things communication

A CMOS digital-bits-in/-out Terahertz (THz) nano-radio with 0.57mm
²
chip area is presented in this paper. The THz operation and bidirectional transmitter/receiver (TX/RX) architecture lead to radio ultra-miniaturization for Internet-of-Things (IoT) and field-deployable sensor applications. The bidirectional THz radio is configured as a harmonic oscillator in the TX mode or as a super-harmonic super-regenerative RX in the RX mode. The TX harmonic oscillator is directly modulated by On-Off Keying (OOK) data for bits-to-THz transmitting, while an on-chip time-to-digital converter (TDC) with 25ps timing resolution measures RX oscillation start-up time for direct THz-to-bits receiving. The radio peak DC power is optimized based on link distance and data rate. It supports maximum 4.4Mb/s OOK over 50cm at 49.3mW peak DC power and 1Mb/s OOK over 17cm at 18.7mW peak DC power without using any Silicon lens.