TSV Antennas for Multi-Band Wireless Communication

On-chip wireless links offer improved network performance due to long distance communication, additional bandwidth, and broadcasting capabilities of antennas. This work challenges the on-chip antenna design conventions, and pushes toward a Through-Silicon Via-based antenna design called TSV_A that establishes multi-band wireless communication through the silicon substrate medium with only a 3 dB loss over a 30mm on-chip distance. The TSV_A performance is evaluated in both Finite Element Method and system-level Network-on-Chip (NoC) simulations. A comparison to traditional wire-based NoCs, analysis of wireless multi-bands, and technology scaling to demonstrate the substantial area improvements compared to traditional wireless NoCs (up to 99.88%) are performed. Simulation results show an improvement in network latency up to ~13% (average improvement of ~7%), energy-delay improvements of ~34% on average, and an improvement in throughput up to ~34% (average improvement of ~23%), using Wireless NoC with multi-band TSV_As. The improved signal performance of TSV_A, and multi-band capabilities, are ideal for wireless intercell communication for programmable metasurfaces with dedicated communication layers.