A 16-Gb/s Low-Power Inductorless Wideband Gain-Boosted Baseband Amplifier With Skewed Differential Topology for Wireless Network-on-Chip

Abstract

This paper presents an inductorless wideband gain-boosted baseband (BB) amplifier suitable for wireless network-on-chip (WiNoC) architectures. Current reuse active feedback (FB) and feed-forward (FF) techniques are proposed for extending bandwidth, increasing gain, and reducing power consumption and area overhead compared to traditional BB amplifiers. To maximize the benefits of the FB and FF amplifiers, a skewed differential topology is introduced, which reduces the impact of ringing in the amplifier’s step response, allowing greater design flexibility and improved performance. The amplifier is fabricated in 65-nm CMOS and achieves a bandwidth of 11 GHz with a small active area, 0.0029 mm2, due to the inductorless bandwidth-extension technique. The amplifier consumes 2.58 mW from a 1-V supply, suitable for a high-data-rate wireless receiver in power- and area-constrained WiNoC. With the proposed BB amplifier, a 60-GHz ON–OFF-keying (OOK) receiver for WiNoC is presented to demonstrate excellent energy efficiency and compact area. The wireless receiver demodulates 16-Gb/s OOK while consuming 16.3 mA with a small area overhead of 0.09 mm2. Based on the high bandwidth, low-power consumption, and small area overhead, to the best of the author’s knowledge, the amplifier achieves the best figure of merit among existing amplifiers in similar CMOS technology nodes.