Constant magnetic field scaling in inductive-coupling data link

A wireless transceiver utilizing inductive coupling has been proposed for communication between chips in system in a package. This transceiver can achieve high-speed communication by using two-dimensional channel arrays. To increase the total bandwidth in the channel arrays, the density of the transceiver should be improved, which means that the inductor size should be scaled down. This paper discusses the scaling theory based on a constant magnetic field rule. By decreasing the chip thickness with the process scaling of 1/alpha, the inductor size can be scaled to 1/alpha and the data rate can be increased by a. As a result, the number of aggregated channels can be increased by alpha(2) and the aggregated data bandwidth can be increased by alpha(3). The scaling theory is verified by simulations and experiments in 350, 250, 180, and 90 nm CMOS.