Sub-Terahertz Wideband ASK Transceiver for 14/27/64 Gb/s 0.27-km/0.12-m/0.1-mm Interconnection in 28-nm CMOS

This article presents a 28-nm CMOS sub-terahertz (sub-THz) amplitude shift-keying (ASK) transceiver achieving competitive wireless and wireline communication performance. The over-the-air (OTA) link demonstrates 14 Gb/s/0.27 km, 16Gb/s/1m, and 27 Gb/s/12 cm without equalization (EQ), while supporting 64 Gb/s on-Off keying (OOK) and 40 Gb/s pulse amplitude modulation (PAM)4 in wireline mode. In the transmitter (TX), a power-boosting technique is proposed for the oscillator to maximize output power and DC-to-RF efficiency with a compact area. An ASK modulator incorporating analog-pre-distortion (APD) compensation is proposed to support high-efficiency and high-speed modulation. A compact 90–180 GHz power amplifier (PA) is utilized to deliver 15–18 dBm output power, with an integrated broadside balanced balun for differential signal interfacing. In the receiver (RX), a 110–160 GHz low-noise amplifier (LNA) with a switchable differential and single-ended interface is proposed, and a 90–180 GHz wideband envelope detector (ED) with DC-35 GHz baseband amplifier (BBA) is designed for high-speed demodulation. A novel metamaterial-loaded modified Vivaldi antenna and a wideband ground-signal-ground (GSG) pads to waveguide transition (WGT) are proposed for wireless link. The transceiver establishes new benchmarks for silicon-based sub-THz ASK systems, demonstrating the longest reported communication distance with competitive data rates, showcasing extensive communication applications.