A wideband body-enabled millimeter-wave transceiver for wireless Network-on-Chip

A highly energy-efficient on-chip communication network is crucial for the development of future multi-core chips. In this paper, a wideband millimeter-wave (mm-wave) transceiver was designed for the wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC) architecture. In order to reduce the power consumption of the transceiver, body-enabled circuit design techniques were implemented: Forward body-bias was used in the low-noise amplifier (LNA) and power amplifier (PA) circuits to lower the threshold voltages, reducing the supply voltage to 0.8 V. For up-and down-conversion mixers, power-hungry transconductance stages were eliminated by feeding the signals directly into the body terminals of the transistors. In addition, a novel feed-forward structure was designed to extend the bandwidth of the LNA at no cost in power consumption. Simulation results showed that the receiver has a double-sideband noise figure of less than 6 dB, and a peak gain of 20.5 dB, while the transmitter has an output P_1dB of 0 dBm. The transceiver achieved an overall 3-dB bandwidth of 18 GHz. Compared with our previous design without body-enabled design techniques, the receiver power consumption was reduced by 20.3%.