A Self-Mixing Picosecond Impulse Receiver With an On-Chip Antenna for High-Speed Wireless Clock Synchronization

This paper presents a millimeter-wave impulse receiver to detect the amplitude of picosecond pulses and extract their repetition rate with low timing jitter. The receiver is based on a self-mixing technique, which extracts the repetition rate by mixing multiple frequency tones of the pulse. The receiver, which is integrated with a broadband on-chip antenna, enables wireless time transfer with an accuracy of 0.38 ps. The fabricated chip is used to detect the amplitude and the repetition rate of sub-6-ps pulses. A tunable baseband amplifier is designed to amplify the extracted repetition rate in the 2-10-GHz range. Analysis of the self-mixing technique, simulation results of the receiver blocks, and measurement results of a multichip wireless synchronization test are reported in this paper.