Research On On-chip RF-I Techniques

Traditional RC bus interconnect be confronted with interconnect lines delayincrease，difficult to control clock deflection，bandwidth waste，bad signal integralityand lack of the characteristic of flexible reconfiguration in Nanometer VLSI technology,and is difficult to satisfy the requirement of interconnect system in future highperformance chip; Optical interconnect has the advantage of high bandwidth, low power,little delay and immunity to interfere, but photoelectron device account for larger chiparea, the cost of integration is too high and is not easy to be manufactured. On chip RFinterconnect technology is compatible with current CMOS technology，has theadvantage of highspeed, potential high bandwidth, small chip area, low power,broadcast communication, flexible reconfiguration,3D integration, which have goodapplication prospect in the high performance chip interconnection technology and haveimportant research values.On chip RF interconnect technology is based on little attenuation andneighborhood electric field capacitance coupling of radio frequency microwave signal,Binary data is transmited and exchanged in the form of radio frequency microwavesignal by amplitude modulation (AM), frequency modulation (FM), phase modulation(PM) to radio frequency microwave signal, the speed of transmission close to lightspeed, On chip RF interconnect technology mainly include on-chip RF interconnectcircuit technology and on-chip RF interconnect data transmission technology. Thispaper deeply researched the on-chip RF interconnection transmission line structure andvoltage controlled oscillator circuit technology, proposed a new silicon substrate shieldcoplanar waveguide transmission line (STL)structure, designed and implemented smallarea, wide frequency tuning range reconfigurable ring voltage-controlled oscillator andtwo low loss LC voltage controlled oscillators, has obtained the good simulationexperiments results.The main research work and innovations in this thesis are asfollows：1、Traditional microstrip line and coplanar waveguide transmission line (STL)structure be confronted with high transmission attenuation, low inductance qualityfactor, coaxial line is difficult to be integrated, and this paper proposed a new siliconsubstrate shield coplanar waveguide transmission line (STL) structure, in whichgrounded shielding metal was used to surround the center signal line and to shield thesignal. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposedtransmission line structure has good characteristic of low transmission loss, highinductance quality factor and efficient signal shielding, and is suitable for on chipmicrowave and millimeter wave signal transmission. 2、The inductor of traditional LC Voltage control oscillator (VCO) be confronted withlarge chip area. A16-bit CMOS digital reconfigurable ring VCO, which has thecharacteristics of small chip area and wide tuning frequency, is designed andimplemented in a0.13μm CMOS process, the designed VCO circuit layout area is assmall as about17.5u×24.5u, with output controllable frequency range of around1.434GHz~11.652GHz and the minimum frequency steps as small as400KHz at25oC.3、The traditional integrated inductor of rectangular、circular、spiral and octagon areconfronted with serious skin effect、high loss and low Inductance quality factor，andcannot satisfy the oscillating of LC-VCO in millimeter wave frequency, two lowtransmission loss mm-wave VCOs is designed and implemented，which are based on theproposed transmission line(STL) small inductor principle with the performance of verylow loss, high inductance quality factor and accurate small inductor, one is A mm-waveLC Voltage controlled oscillator based on new silicon substrate shield coplanarwaveguide transmission line (STL) small inductor, and the other is A Digital Tuningmm-wave LC Voltage controlled oscillator based on new silicon substrate shieldcoplanar waveguide transmission line (STL) small inductor. Circuit layouts of the twomm-wave VCO are designed and simulated, and experimental results show that: twomm-wave VCO circuit has the characteristics of smooth output oscillation waveform,low phase noise and high oscillation frequency. The designed two mm-wave VCOcircuit effectively transform the binary digital signal into RF signal, and greatly increasethe frequency bandwidth of data transmission.The work and achievements presented in this thesis have academic and practicalvalues for advancing the development and application of on-chip RF interconnecttechnology and new on-chip interconnect technology.