Design of a Wideband Antenna for Wireless Network-On-Chip in Multimedia Applications

To allow fast communication—at several Gb/s—of multimedia content among processors and memories in a multi-processor system-on-chip, a new approach is emerging in literature: Wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC). With reference to this scenario, this paper presents the design of the key element of the WiNoC: the antenna. Specifically, a bow-tie antenna is proposed, which operates at mm-waves and can be implemented on-chip using the top metal layer of a conventional silicon CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) technology. The antenna performance is discussed in the paper and is compared to the state-of-the-art, including the zig-zag antenna topology that is typically used in literature as a reference for WiNoC. The proposed bow-tie antenna design for WiNoC stands out for its good trade-off among bandwidth, gain, size and beamwidth vs. the state-of-the-art.