MAC-Oriented Programmable Terahertz PHY via Graphene-based Yagi-Uda Antennas

Graphene is enabling a plethora of applications in a wide range of fields due to its unique electrical, mechanical, and optical properties. In the realm of wireless communications, graphene shows great promise for the implementation of miniaturized and tunable antennas in the terahertz band. These unique advantages open the door to new reconfigurable antenna structures which, in turn, enable novel communication protocols at different levels of the stack. This paper explores both aspects by, first, presenting a terahertz Yagi-Uda-like antenna concept that achieves reconfiguration both in frequency and beam direction simultaneously. Then, a programmable antenna controller design is proposed to expose the reconfigurability to the PHY and MAC layers, and several examples of its applicability are given. The performance and cost of the proposed scheme is evaluated through full-wave simulations and comparative analysis, demonstrating reconfigurability at nanosecond granularity with overheads below 0.02 mm$^{2}$ and 0.2 mW.Comment: Accepted for presentation in IEEE WCNC '1

Soft Graphene-Based Antennas for Ultrawideband Wireless Communication

Ensuring user-friendliness and the seamless integration of technology into the fabric is a key challenge both for academics and industry participants. Thus, textiles that provide a seamless command-oriented user interface, and are capable of wireless communication have been an increasingly popular topic in recent years. In the field of textile antennas, patch antennas either with the use of embroidering techniques, conductive fabrics or inkjet-printing are leading the way over traditional bulky antennas. However, there are still significant problems in additive antenna fabrication such as the need to use metallic components as the conductive element which quickly becoming corroded and oxidised and also lead to high material costs. The main objective of this study is to develop graphene-based antennas for smart textiles that push the state-of-the-art in wireless body-centric systems, by utilising traditional textile manufacturing techniques. Hence, this research suggests a graphene-based antenna on a textile substrate, where the conformity of the antenna is highly desirable for wearable and body-centric applications. The designed antenna consists of a coplanar-waveguide-fed planar inverted cone-shaped patch geometry, aiming at ultrawideband antennas that work in a wide spectrum from 3.1 to 10.6GHz

Applications of Graphene at Microwave Frequencies

In view to the epochal scenarios that nanotechnology discloses, nano-electronics has the potential to introduce a paradigm shift in electronic systems design similar to that of the transition from vacuum tubes to semiconductor devices. Since low dimensional (1D and 2D) nano-structured materials exhibit unprecedented electro-mechanical properties in a wide frequency range, including radio-frequencies (RF), microwave nano-electronics provides an enormous and yet widely undiscovered opportunity for the engineering community. Carbon nano-electronics is one of the main research routes of RF/microwave nano-electronics. In particular, graphene has shown proven results as an emblematic protagonist, and a real solution for a wide variety of microwave electronic devices and circuits. This paper introduces graphene properties in the microwave range, and presents a paradigm of novel graphene-based devices and applications in the microwave/RF frequency range

A Scalable & Energy Efficient Graphene-Based Interconnection Framework for Intra and Inter-Chip Wireless Communication in Terahertz Band

Network-on-Chips (NoCs) have emerged as a communication infrastructure for the multi-core System-on-Chips (SoCs). Despite its advantages, due to the multi-hop communication over the metal interconnects, traditional Mesh based NoC architectures are not scalable in terms of performance and energy consumption. Folded architectures such as Torus and Folded Torus were proposed to improve the performance of NoCs while retaining the regular tile-based structure for ease of manufacturing. Ultra-low-latency and low-power express channels between communicating cores have also been proposed to improve the performance of conventional NoCs. However, the performance gain of these approaches is limited due to metal/dielectric based interconnection. Many emerging interconnect technologies such as 3D integration, photonic, Radio Frequency (RF), and wireless interconnects have been envisioned to alleviate the issues of a metal/dielectric interconnect system. However, photonic and RF interconnects need the additional physically overlaid optical waveguides or micro-strip transmission lines to enable data transmission across the NoC. Several on-chip antennas have shown to improve energy efficiency and bandwidth of on-chip data communications. However, the date rates of the mm-wave wireless channels are limited by the state-of-the-art power-efficient transceiver design. Recent research has brought to light novel graphene based antennas operating at THz frequencies. Due to the higher operating frequencies compared to mm-wave transceivers, the data rate that can be supported by these antennas are significantly higher. Higher operating frequencies imply that graphene based antennas are just hundred micrometers in size compared to dimensions in the range of a millimeter of mm-wave antennas. Such reduced dimensions are suitable for integration of several such transceivers in a single NoC for relatively low overheads. In this work, to exploit the benefits of a regular NoC structure in conjunction with emerging Graphene-based wireless interconnect. We propose a toroidal folding based NoC architecture. The novelty of this folding based approach is that we are using low power, high bandwidth, single hop direct point to point wireless links instead of multihop communication that happens through metallic wires. We also propose a novel phased based communication protocol through which multiple wireless links can be made active at a time without having any interference among the transceiver. This offers huge gain in terms of performance as compared to token based mechanism where only a single wireless link can be made active at a time. We also propose to extend Graphene-based wireless links to enable energy-efficient, phase-based chip-to-chip communication to create a seamless, wireless interconnection fabric for multichip systems as well. Through cycle-accurate system-level simulations, we demonstrate that such designs with torus like folding based on THz links instead of global wires along with the proposed phase based multichip systems. We provide estimates that they are able to provide significant gains (about 3 to 4 times better in terms of achievable bandwidth, packet latency and average packet energy when compared to wired system) in performance and energy efficiency in data transfer in a NoC as well as multichip system. Thus, realization of these kind of interconnection framework that could support high data rate links in Tera-bits-per-second that will alleviate the capacity limitations of current interconnection framework

Near-Field UHF RFID Transponder with a Screen-Printed Graphene Antenna

As a method of producing RFID tags, printed graphene provides a low-cost and eco-friendly alternative to the etching of aluminum or copper. The high resistivity of graphene, however, sets a challenge for the antenna design. In practice, it has led to using very large antennas in the UHF RFID far field tags demonstrated before. Using inductive near field as the coupling method between the reader and the tag is an alternative to the radiating far field also at UHF. The read range of such a near field tag is very short, but, on the other hand, the tag is extremely simple and small. In this paper, near field UHF RFID transponders with screen-printed graphene antennas are presented and the effect of the dimensions of the tag and the attachment method of the microchip studied. The attachment of the microchip is an important step of the fabrication process of a tag that has its impact on the final cost of a tag. Of the tags demonstrated, even the smallest one with the outer dimensions of 21 mm * 18 mm and the chip attached with isotropic conductive adhesive (ICA) was readable from a distance of 10 mm with an RF power marginal of 19 dB, which demonstrates that an operational and small graphene-based UHF RFID tag can be fabricated with low-cost industrial processes.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures. IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology, 201

Graphene-based Wireless Agile Interconnects for Massive Heterogeneous Multi-chip Processors

The main design principles in computer architecture have recently shifted from a monolithic scaling-driven approach to the development of heterogeneous architectures that tightly co-integrate multiple specialized processor and memory chiplets. In such data-hungry multi-chip architectures, current Networks-in-Package (NiPs) may not be enough to cater to their heterogeneous and fast-changing communication demands. This position paper makes the case for wireless in-package nanonetworking as the enabler of efficient and versatile wired-wireless interconnect fabrics for massive heterogeneous processors. To that end, the use of graphene-based antennas and transceivers with unique frequency-beam reconfigurability in the terahertz band is proposed. The feasibility of such a nanonetworking vision and the main research challenges towards its realization are analyzed from the technological, communications, and computer architecture perspectives.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 1 table - Accepted at IEEE Wireless Communications Magazin

FDMA Enabled Phase-based Wireless Network-on-Chip using Graphene-based THz-band Antennas

The future growth in System-on-chip design is moving in the direction of multicore systems. Design of efficient interconnects between cores are crucial for improving the performance of a multicore processor. Such trends are seen due to the benefits the multicore systems provide in terms of power reduction and scalability. Network-on-chips (NoC) are viewed as an emerging solution in the design of interconnects in multicore systems. However, Traditional Network-on-chip architectures are no longer able to satisfy the performance requirements due to long distance communication over multi-hop wireline paths. Multi-hop communication leads to higher energy consumption, increase in latency and reduction in bandwidth. Research in recent years has explored emerging technologies such as 3D integration, photonic and radio frequency based Network-on-chips. The use of wireless interconnects using mm-wave antennas are able to alleviate the performance issues in a wireline interconnect system. However, to satisfy the increasing demand for higher bandwidth and lower energy consumption, Wireless Network-on-Chip enabled with high speed direct links operating in THz band between distant cores is desired. Recent research has brought to light highly efficient graphene-based antennas operating in THz band. These antennas can provide high data rate and are found to consume less power with low area overheads. In this thesis, an innovative approach using novel devices based on graphene structures is proposed to provide a high-performance on-chip interconnection. This novel approach combines the regular NoC structure with the proposed wireless infrastructure to exploit the performance benefits. An architecture with wireless interfaces on every core is explored in this work. Simultaneous multiple communications in a network can be achieved by adopting Frequency Division Multiple access (FDMA). However, in a system where all cores are equipped with a wireless interface, FDMA requires more number of frequency bands. This becomes difficult to achieve as the system scales and the number of cores increase. Therefore, a FDMA protocol along with a 4-phased repetitive multi-band architecture is envisioned in this work. The phase-based protocol allows multiple wireless links to be active at a time, the phase-based protocol along with the FDMA protocol provides a reliable data transfer between cores with lesser number of frequency bands. In this thesis, an architecture with a combination of FDMA and phase-based protocol using point-to-point graphene-based wireless links is proposed. The proposed architecture is also extended for a multichip system. With cycle accurate system-level simulations, it is shown that the proposed architecture provides huge gains in performance and energy-efficiency in data transfer both in NoC based multicore and multichip systems

Graphene-based Wireless Agile Interconnects for Massive Heterogeneous Multi-chip Processors

The main design principles in computer architecture have recently shifted from a monolithic scaling-driven approach to the development of heterogeneous architectures that tightly co-integrate multiple specialized processor and memory chiplets. In such data-hungry multi-chip architectures, current Networksin- Package (NiPs) may not be enough to cater to their heterogeneous and fast-changing communication demands. This position paper makes the case for wireless in-package networking as the enabler of efficient and versatile wired-wireless interconnect fabrics for massive heterogeneous processors. To that end, the use of graphene-based antennas and transceivers with unique frequency-beam reconfigurability in the terahertz band is proposed. The feasibility of such a wireless vision and the main research challenges towards its realization are analyzed from the technological, communications, and computer architecture perspectives

Graphene-based wireless agile interconnects for massive heterogeneous multi-chip processors

The main design principles in computer architecture have recently shifted from a monolithic scaling-driven approach to the development of heterogeneous architectures that tightly co-integrate multiple specialized processor and memory chiplets. In such data-hungry multi-chip architectures, current Networks-in-Package (NiPs) may not be enough to cater to their heterogeneous and fast-changing communication demands. This position article makes the case for wireless in-package networking as the enabler of efficient and versatile wired-wireless interconnect fabrics for massive heterogeneous processors. To that end, the use of graphene-based antennas and transceivers with unique frequency-beam reconfigurability in the terahertz band is proposed. The feasibility of such a wireless vision and the main research challenges toward its realization are analyzed from the technological, communications, and computer architecture perspectives.This publication is part of the Spanish I+D+i project TRAINER-A (ref. PID2020-118011GB-C21), funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. This work has been also supported by the European Commission under H2020 grants WiPLASH (GA 863337), 2D-EPL (GA 952792), and Graphene Flagship (GA 881603); the FLAGERA framework under grant TUGRACO (HA 3022/9-1, LE 2440/3-1), the European Research Council under grants WINC (GA 101042080), COMPUSAPIEN (GA 725657), and PROJESTOR (GA 682675), the German Ministry of Education and Research under grant GIMMIK (03XP0210) and the and the German Research Foundation under grant HIPEDI (WA 4139/1-1).Peer ReviewedArticle signat per 21 autors/es: Sergi Abadal, Robert Guirado, Hamidreza Taghvaee, and Akshay Jain are with the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain; Elana Pereira de Santana and Peter Haring Bolívar are with the University of Siegen, Germany; Mohamed Saeed, Renato Negra, Kun-Ta Wang, and Max C. Lemme are with RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Zhenxing Wang, Kun-Ta Wang, and Max C. Lemme are also with AMO GmbH, Germany; Joshua Klein, Marina Zapater, Alexandre Levisse, and David Atienza are with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland. Marina Zapater is also with the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland; Davide Rossi and Francesco Conti are with the University of Bologna,Italy; Martino Dazzi, Geethan Karunaratne, Irem Boybat, and Abu Sebastian are with IBM Research Europe, SwitzerlandPostprint (author's final draft