A 125GHz transceiver in 65nm CMOS assembled with FR4 PCB antenna for contactless wave-connectors

This paper presents a millimeter-wave (125GHz) based ultra-short distance (~2mm) contactless wave-connector (CWC) for consumer interconnect applications. Conventional high-speed connectors in interconnect standard such as USB, HDMI, DP, and Thunderbolt are not only expensive, but also suffer poor performance in both mechanical reliability and signal integrity often becoming a bottleneck in high-performance computing systems. The proposed CWC exploits a 125GHz CMOS transmitter (TX), receiver (RX), and compact FR4 PCB antenna to realize high-speed (>10Gb/s), low-cost, and energy-efficient connector solutions. An on-off keying (OOK) modulation is utilized for a non-coherent transceiver (TRX) architecture. In addition, antennas are designed on an FR4HR substrate for a compatibility with an existing infrastructure. The CMOS TX and RX is assembled with the antenna through a flip-chip process. The demonstrated CWC draws a total of 60mW of power under 1.1V supply while transferring 14Gb/s of data rate, achieving 4.28pJ/bit energy efficiency.