Wireless Transceiver for Three-Dimensional Integrated Circuits Using a Ring Oscillator

In this paper, we propose an oscillation-type transceiver for wireless chip-to-chip communication (WCC). The proposed transceiver is composed of a ring oscillator, coils, inverter-type amplifier, voltage multiplier and comparator. The ring oscillator itself acts as the on-off keying (OOK) modulator. The envelope of the transferred OOK-modulated signal is detected in the voltage multiplier of the receiver. Given that the proposed transceiver uses an OOK-modulated oscillating signal, the noise immunity is improved compared to the typical pulse-type transceiver. To verify the functionality of the proposed transceiver, we design the transceiver using the 180-nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process. From the measured results, we verify that the proposed transceiver recovers the entered digital signal up to a distance of 0.2mm between the primary and secondary coils. Additionally, the sensitivity to the bias voltage of the latch is nonexistent by virtue of removing the latch in the proposed transceiver.