Energy-Efficient and Rotationally Adjustable Millimeter-Wave Wireless Interconnects

Abstract

Conventional interconnects experience significant mechanical durability, mobility, and signal integrity challenges when dealing with moving parts or implementing extensive interconnect networks. As a result, they often hinder the performance of advanced autonomous and high-performance computing systems. This paper presents a fully rotatable and diagonally flexible ultra-short distance (≈ 1 mm) wireless interconnect. The proposed wireless interconnect comprises a 57-GHz transceiver integrated with a folded dipole antenna through wire bonding, enabling a flexible contactless connection. Here, two folded dipoles communicate in the Fresnel zone (radiative near-field), where we leverage the longitudinal electric fields to alleviate the polarization mismatch over the entire rotation angle. We have implemented a non-coherent on-off keying (OOK) modulation scheme and employed an automatic gain control (AGC) loop and offset canceling feedback loop to compensate for the transmission degradation and signal imbalance. The proposed system consumes 58.2 mW of power under a 1 V supply while transferring data at a rate of 10-Gb/s, achieving 5.82-pJ/bit energy efficiency.