Simulation based study of on-chip antennas for a reconfigurable hybrid 3D wireless NoC

The feasibility of using on-chip antennas for a reconfigurable 3D wireless network-on-chip (3D-WiNoC) on a 3D integrated circuit (IC) is shown. The reconfigurable 3D-WiNoC is designed with on-chip antennas which are proposed to be used in conjunction with the metal interconnects making it a hybrid design. The feasibility of the on-chip antennas is shown by performing a 3-D finite element method (FEM) based full wave electro-magnetic analysis on a 3D IC model. The 3D IC is modeled according to a complimentary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) silicon on insulator (SoI) Benzocyclobutene (BCB) polymer adhesive bonding 3-D circuit integration technology. It is shown that it is possible to have two different frequency domains for the signal sources and the dynamic switching of the signal sinks between the two frequency domains, with minimal design and area overhead. When implemented, the proposed hybrid network architecture with two frequency channels can reduce the latency and increase the network throughput.