Design and Performance Analysis of THz Wireless Communication Systems for Chip-to-Chip and Personal Area Networks Applications

Terahertz (THz) communication is a promising technique for chip-to-chip communication and wireless personal area networks. In this paper, we present an experimental study and design to realize such THz communication systems. We develop two different chip sets for on-off-keying (OOK) modulation based THz transceivers which include carrier generators, modulators, THz amplifiers, and baseband amplifiers. Specifically, the first chip set integrates the circuit blocks for the OOK modulation without the THz amplifier for short-range communication. In addition, the second chip set design includes the THz amplifier modules to extend the coverage of transmission. For these two chip sets, we experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of the wireless communication at THz frequency bands and assess performance using the bit error rate (BER) analysis. We estimate the BER by calculating the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) based on the eye diagram and compare with actual BER measurements and Monte Carlo simulations. We also address the impact of the distance, the transmit power, and the data rate for the proposed THz transceivers based on the link budget analysis, and confirm the accuracy of the derived BER expression.