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This paper presents a bonding-less 5 GHz radio frequency identification (RFID) tag module using an 85% downsized RFID tag chip and a 97% downsized antenna. Inductive (or magnetic) coupling between the antenna and the chip realizes low cost bonding-less implementation. Compared with a conventional module operating in the UHF band, the proposed module operating in the 5 GHz range is downsized in terms of both the chip and the antenna sizes. The experimental results confirmed that the proposed RFID tag module successfully works at 20 cm away from a reader whose output power is 15 dBm, achieving the same figure of merit as a conventionally bonded module. Moreover, this paper confirmed that the misalignment tolerance of the inductive coupling can be up to 50 μ m. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 6 Gb/s 9.8 pJ/b rotatable non-contact connector applicable to industrial robot arms is developed. The proposed non-contact connector enables a high-speed and highly reliable wireless data connection between three-dimensional (3-D) cameras and an edge computer in an autonomously controlled robot. A rotatable transmission line coupler (RTLC) is proposed to accommodate the rotational operation of the robot arm. Since the proposed doughnut-shaped RTLC has a constant overlapped area at any rotation angle, the RTLC has a constant coupling gain at all rotation angles. To remove inter-symbol interference (ISI) occurring at a specific rotation angle, a pulse-equalizing receiver is also developed. An interface bridge IC is proposed to transfer a wide range of interface signals from a slow-control signal such as the control area network (CAN) to a high-speed video interface signal. A signal protocol conversion technique applying on-off keying (OOK) modulation is also developed in order to transfer slow legacy interfaces used in the robot arms that include a dc component. Experiments with a test chip fabricated in a 40 nm CMOS process confirmed that bit error rate (BER) was lower than 10 $^{-12}$ at any rotation angle in a communication distance of 3 mm. The proposed system improves energy efficiency by a factor of 3.7, area efficiency by a factor of 1.8. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

H2 and NH3 detection with low power consumption was demonstrated by integrated chemiresistive Pt and PtRh nanosheet sensors on glass substrates. The self-heating effects realized low power and local heating of metal nanosheet sensors, enabling the integration of sensors with different operating temperatures. Based on different resistance changes in Pt and PtRh nanosheets toward H2 and NH3, the concentration of each gas was detected from a gas mixture by consuming around 1-mW power. For decreasing the power consumption and further integration of sensors, sensor scaling and pulsed operations were numerically and experimentally studied. In addition to good connectivity of metal nanosheet sensors to large-scale integration (LSI) circuits, improvements of the power consumption by sensor scaling were proven. The pulsed operations required for integrated sensor arrays maintained a sensor response, or a resistance change, of approximately 60%, even when the power consumption was reduced by 20%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

QUEST is a programmable multiple instruction, multiple data (MIMD) parallel accelerator for general-purpose state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs). It features die-to-die stacking with three-cycle latency, 28.8 GB/s, 96 MB, and eight SRAMs using an inductive coupling technology called the ThruChip interface (TCI). By stacking the SRAMs instead of DRAMs, lower memory access latency and simpler hardware are expected. This facilitates in balancing the memory capacity, latency, and bandwidth, all of which are in demand by cutting-edge DNNs at a high level. QUEST also introduces log-quantized programmable bit-precision processing for achieving faster (larger) DNN computation (size) in a 3-D module. It can sustain higher recognition accuracy at a lower bitwidth region compared to linear quantization. The prototype QUEST chip is integrated in the 40-nm CMOS technology, and it achieves 7.49 tera operations per second (TOPS) peak performance in binary precision, and 1.96 TOPS in 4-bit precision at 300-MHz clock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A versatile reconfigurable accelerator architecture for binary/ternary deep neural networks is presented. In-memory neural network processing without any external data accesses, sustained by the symmetry and simplicity of the computation of the binary/ternaty neural network, improves the energy efficiency dramatically. The prototype chip is fabricated, and it achieves 1.4 TOPS (tera operations per second) peak performance with 0.6-W power consumption at 400-MHz clock. The application examination is also conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A non-contact interface for modular smartphones that can provide a data connection at a maximum MIPI rate of 6 Gb/s has been developed. A two-fold transmission line coupler, which is a small-size coupler that has a wide bandwidth, is proposed for modular smartphones, where the layout area is strictly limited. The coupler size is 6 mm2 for a 5 mm communication distance, which is 1/24 smaller than the conventional coupler. Since many wireless communication components, such as LTE, WiFi, and GPS transceivers, are assembled in a small module, the interference between the non-contact interface and the wireless transceivers should be suppressed. To improve noise immunity and reduce unwanted radiation from the coupler, an electromagnetic-compatibility robust pulse transceiver is proposed. A synchronous receiver using an edge counting clock recovery circuit improves noise immunity, and a bi-phase pulse transmitter reduces noise radiation in the GPS band. There is no EMS by LTE or WiFi signals on the data connection at BER < 10^-12 when the coupler is separated by a distance of 2 mm and no EMI on GPS signals at a separation of 10 mm. Compared with the state-of-the-art result, the highest energy efficiency (6 pJ/b) and space efficiency (1.2 \textmm^2/1 \textmm distance) is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A highly reliable wireless solid-state drive (SSD) system for future applications of large volume storage is presented. The wireless interface in the system consists of an inductively coupled power link with fast transmission power control and high-speed data links using transmission line couplers (TLCs). The wireless power link can deliver 1 W from the host to the SSD. The full duplex wireless data interface achieves raw data rate of 1.6 Gb/s. The reliability of the wireless interface is studied though simulation analysis and experiments. The error correction block for the NAND flash memory system can also correct errors in the wireless data links, allowing the requirements for the PHY layer to be relaxed. The error correction code is discussed, including optimization by analyzing the error bits on the wireless data links. The experimental results confirmed strong tolerance to the interference from the power link on the wireless data link, and the water proof property of both the data and power links. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wireless 3-D network-on-chips (NoCs) with inductive-coupling ThruChip interfaces provide a large degree of flexibility for customizing the number of arbitrary chips in a package after chips have been fabricated. To simplify the vertical communication interfaces, static time division multiple access (TDMA) is used for the vertical broadcast buses, while arbitrary or customized topologies can be used for the intrachip network. This paper proposes two techniques to break through the simple static TDMA-based vertical buses while maintaining a simple communication interface. The first technique is headfirst sliding (HS) routing to reduce the waiting time for acquiring the communication time-slot. HS routing selects the best vertical bus based on the current time, taking advantage of static TDMA. The second technique extends carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) for vertical broadcast buses. We introduce a packet collision detection technique for inductive-coupling buses and propose two retransmission strategies to reduce the waiting time for packet retransmissions caused by collisions. Network simulation results show that HS routing reduces the communication latency by 39.1% compared with the conventional static TDMA bus-based 3-D NoC that uses the shortest path routing. The proposed CSMA/CD bus also improves the latency by 52.5% and throughput by 34.1%. The full-system simulation results show that HS routing and the proposed CSMA/CD technique reduce the application execution time accordingly while maintaining the average flit transfer energy overhead modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A blind source separation (BSS) is proposed to reject the crosstalk between inductive-coupling channels in 3-D systems. The phase and permutation ambiguities inherent to BSS are compensated for in the proposed technique. A continuous-time natural gradient BSS with integrator output swing bounding, which is amenable for high-speed implementation, is also proposed. Techniques to reduce the implementation complexity for a large channel array are presented. The proposed technique shows substantial improvement results for crosstalk rejection in a high-crosstalk-coupling environment. In addition, for a 3 \times 3 array channel with 1 Gb/s/channel, with a crosstalk-to-signal ratio of -3 dB, a bit-error rate of 10^-11 is obtained compared to 10^-4 without BSS. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A 0.3–0.8 V low-power 2-bit/step asynchronous successive approximation register analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is presented. A low-power 2-bit/step operation technique is proposed which uses dynamic threshold configuring comparator instead of multiple digital-to-analog converters (DACs). Power and area overhead is minimized by successively activated comparators. The comparator threshold is configured by simple Vcm biased current source, which keep the ADC free from power supply variations over 10%. Simple digital calibration is enabled by generating the reference internally. The prototype ADC fabricated in a 40 nm CMOS achieved a 44.3 dB signal-to-noise-plus-distortion ratio (SNDR) with 6.14 MS/s at a single supply voltage of 0.5 V. The ADC achieved a peak FoM of 4.8 fJ/conv-step at 0.4 V and operates down to 0.3 V. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A wireless 3D NoC architecture is described for building-block SiPs, in which the number of hardware components (or chips) in a package can be changed after chips have been fabricated. The architecture uses inductive-coupling links that can connect more than two examined dies without wire connections. Each chip has data transceivers for the uplink and downlink in order to communicate with its neighboring chips in the package. These chips form a vertical unidirectional ring network so as to fully exploit the flexibility of the wireless approach that enables us to add, remove, and swap the chips in the ring. To avoid protocol and structural deadlocks in the ring, we use bubble flow control, which does not rely on the conventional VC-based deadlock avoidance mechanism. In addition, we propose a bidirectional communication scheme to form a bidirectional ring network by using the inductive-coupling transceivers that can dynamically change the communication modes, such as TX, RX, and Idle modes. This paper illustrates the inductive-coupling transceiver circuits, which can carry high data transfer rates of up to 8 Gbps per channel, for the wireless 3D NoC. It also illustrates an implementation of a wireless 3D NoC that has on-chip routers and transceivers implemented with a 65 nm process in order to show the feasibility of our proposal. The vertical bubble flow control and conventional VC-based approach on the uni- and bidirectional ring networks are compared with the vertical broadcast bus in terms of throughput, hardware amount, and application performance using a full system multiprocessor simulator. The results show that the proposed bidirectional communication scheme efficiently improves application performance without adding any inductive-coupling transceivers. In addition, the proposed vertical bubble flow network outperforms the conventional VC-based approach by 7.9-12.5 percent with a 33.5 percent smaller router area for building-block SiPs connecting up to eight chips. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various papers presented at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Solid-State Circuits Conference held in California on February 17–21, 2013 on topics such as sensors, digital circuits, and transistors.

A noncontact and housing-less thin–thick connecting method was developed for mobile industry processor interface (MIPI) applications. This paper describes the world's first 0.15-mm-thick connector using a vertical directional coupler (VDC) which enables simultaneous two-link communication with one coupler without fatal performance degradation. We have analyzed the conditions for isolating two links in a coupler, and the design method is discussed. A fully balanced pulse transmitter implemented in 90-nm CMOS technology significantly suppressed electromagnetic interference (EMI), which agrees well with MIPI requirements. An experimental liquid crystal display interface system reached a maximum data rate of 2.3 Gb/s/link at a bit error rate of less than 10^-12 and a power consumption of 1.47~pJ/b. The timing margin of single link was 320 ps (=64% U.I.) and of two links was 305 ps (=61% U.I.) at 2.0 Gb/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors developed a scalable heterogeneous multicore processor. 3D heterogeneous chip stacking of a general-purpose CPU and reconfigurable multicore accelerators enables various trade-offs between performance and energy consumption. The stacked chips interconnect through a scalable 3D network on a chip (NoC). By simply changing the number of stacked accelerator chips, processor parallelism can be widely scaled. No design change is needed, and hence, no additional nonrecurring engineering (NRE) cost is required. An inductive-coupling ThruChip Interface (TCI) is applied to stacked-chip communications, forming a low-cost and robust high-speed 3D NoC. The authors developed a prototype system called Cube-1 with 65-nm CMOS test chips, and confirmed successful system operations, including 10 hours of continuous Linux OS operation. Simple filters and a streaming application were implemented on Cube-1 and performance acceleration up to about three times was achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an ultralow-power and ultralow-voltage SAR ADC. Full asynchronous operation and boosted self-power gating are proposed to improve conversion accuracy and reduce static leakage power. By designing with MOSFET of high threshold voltage (HVt) and low threshold voltage (LVt), the leakage power is reduced without decrease of maximum sampling frequency. The test chip in 40-nm CMOS process has successfully reduced leakage power by 98%, and it achieves 8.2-bit ENOB and while consuming only 650 pW at 0.1 kS/s from 0.5-V power supply. The power consumption is scalable up to 4 MS/s and power supply range from 0.4 to 0.7 V. The best figure of merit at 0.5 V is 5.2 fJ/conversion-step at 20 kS/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]