Transmitter for wireless inter-chip data communications

The dramatic fluctuation of gasoline price is a major concern for all. Hybrid electric vehicles with ∼ 2 times higher fuel efficiency have drawn lots of attention in the last few years. In order to replace costly photo-couplers used in hybrid engine controller boards, silicon based solutions are utilized to suggest the feasibility to lower cost and increase data rate.;This dissertation presents the design of an electronic isolator using inductive coupling fabricated in the UMC 130-nm mixed mode CMOS process. It can achieve 70-V DC isolation and around 160-MHz data transmission rate while drawing ∼ 22 mA. It only occupies 0.52 mm2, which is 3 times smaller, compared to the isolators using a capacitive coupling method. The electronic isolator is designed to provide sufficient isolation of high and low voltages coexisting in the same board. It can be used in RS-232 and IEEE 1394 applications.;The channel characteristics including antenna pair gain and delay spreads at 24-GHz in a printed circuit board for controlling hybrid engines with and without a metal cover are characterized using a 3-mm on-chip dipole antenna pair. At a 15-cm separation, the antenna pair gain can be improved by ∼10 dB with a metal cover ∼ 3.5 cm above the PCB and the maximum excess delay can be reduced to ∼ 1.1 ns from ∼ 16.5 ns, which is acceptable for recovery of clock and data for a 400 Mchip/sec system. It has been verified that on-chip dipole antennas can be used for wireless communication in the hybrid engine controller board.;Wireless interconnection using two separate wireless transceivers can operate with two different ground potentials that have large difference. A fully-integrated CDMA transmitter with an on-chip dipole antenna operating at 16.8 GHz fabricated in the UMC 130-nm CMOS process is demonstrated. It supports 7 signal levels with a 16.8-GHz carrier and 400-Mbps data rate. It includes a PLL, divider chains, a double balanced Gilbert cell up-conversion mixer, a power amplifier (PA), attenuators, a digital coder, a duplexer, and a 4-mm on-chip dipole antenna. The PA used in the transmitter chain can achieve 10-dBm saturated output power and ∼ 22-% maximum PAE. Most of the rise and fall times are around 200 ps. The worst case is 800 ps for the level 0 to level 2 transition. The CDMA transmitter occupies ∼ 5.2 mm2 and consumes 198 mW.;A bus interconnected with wireless links on a printed circuit board in which multiple sets of devices/chips can simultaneously communicate and control signals can be broadcasted to multiple devices has been presented in the dissertation. A gold bond wire with ∼ 1-mil diameter is co-optimized with a bond pad to resonate at ∼ 60 GHz. With a metal cover representing an enclosure for an electronic system (2-mm from a printed circuit board), the antenna pair gain at 10-cm separation is ∼ -53 dB including the effects of two nearby bond wires located 300 microm away. This is sufficient for building an inter-chip 1-Gbps radio link with bit error rate of 10 -12. The bond wire antennas should also be useful for general purpose over the air communication in the 60-GHz unlicensed band.