High energy-efficiency high bandwidth-density sub-THz interconnect for the “Last-Centimeter” chip-to-chip communications

This paper presents a high energy-efficiency and high bandwidth-density dielectric waveguide based sub-THz interconnect. A bumpless flip-channel packaged nearfield coupled transition based channel together with the holistic active circuit design scheme boosts the energy efficiency to the record based on the authors' best knowledge. The channel demonstrates the transmission loss of 0.04 dB/mm and the bending loss of 0.17 dB/bend. This proof-of-concept sub-THz link, with active circuits in 65 nm bulk CMOS, demonstrates the bit error rate of less than 1 × 10^-12 up to 12.1 Gb/s with a high bandwidth density of 80.7 Gb/s/mm². The record energy efficiency of 0.32 pJ/b is achieved at 10 Gb/s with 3.2 mW power consumption. The communication distance is 46.2 mm.