A Fully Integrated 5-mW, 0.8-Gbps Energy-Efficient Chip-to-Chip Data Link for Ultralow-Power IoT End-Nodes in 65-nm CMOS

The increasing complexity of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications and near-sensor processing algorithms is pushing the computational power low-power, battery-operated end-node systems. This trend also reveals growing demands for high-speed energy-efficient inter-chip communications to manage amount data coming from off-chip sensors memories. While traditional micro-controller interfaces such as SPIs cannot cope with tight energy large bandwidth requirements, low-voltage swing transceivers can tackle this challenge thanks their capability achieve several Gbps communication speed at milliwatt levels. However, recent research on serial links focused high-performance systems, a consumption significantly larger than one low-power IoT end-nodes, or stand-alone designs not integrated system level. paper presents low-swing transceiver low chip-to-chip fully within an System-on-Chip, fabricated in CMOS 65nm technology. be easily controlled via software interface; thus, we consider realistic scenarios communication, which assessed prototypes. Chip measurements show that achieves 8.46x higher efficiency 15.9x performance microcontroller interface single-SPI.