A 13.5-Gb/s 140-GHz Silicon Redriver Exploiting Metadevices for Short-Range OOK Communications

Abstract

The effort to confine the electromagnetic field by silicon passive metadevices has made the design of an on-chip wideband sub-terahertz (sub-THz) I/O redriver feasible, paving a new way toward energy-efficient and crosstalk-immune ON–OFF keying (OOK) communications. Two metadevices, namely spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) metawaveguide and split-ring resonator (SRR), are exploited to build the sub-THz low-crosstalk silicon channel and high-ON–OFF-ratio modulator, respectively. A sub-THz signal source combining the merit of spoof SPPs and SRR is introduced. A 140-GHz dual-channel redriver composed of these metadevices is fully integrated in a 65-nm CMOS technology. The redriver realizes both 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">7</sup> –1 and 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">31</sup> –1 13.5 Gb/s/lane for dual-channel OOK modulation. The measured energy efficiency is 2.6 pJ/bit/lane and the bit error rate (BER) is ≤10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−12</sup> , demonstrating a crosstalk-immune sub-THz I/O system. The power consumption is 35.1 mW/lane and the active area of the redriver is 0.23 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .