An energy-efficient intra-chip communication link circuit with ternary current signaling is proposed for an asynchronous Network-on-Chip. The data signal encoded by an asynchronous three-state protocol is represented by a small-voltage-swing three-level intermediate signal, which results in the reduction of transition delay and achieving energy-efficient data transfer. The three-level voltage is generated by using a combination of dynamically controlled current sources with feedback loop mechanism. Moreover, the proposed circuit contains a power-saving scheme where the dynamically controlled transistors also are utilized. By cutting off the current paths when the data transfer on the communication link is inactive, the power dissipation can be greatly reduced. It is demonstrated that the average data-transfer speed is about 1.5 times faster than that of a binary CMOS implementation using a 130nm CMOS technology at the supply voltage of 1.2V.

A novel UWB system for a new indoor short distance radio-communication is examined. Various types of UWB systems have been proposed in the literature. Particularly direct sequence (DS) systems and time hopping (TH) systems are attractive due to low power consumption and a simple transceiver construction. In this paper, we consider to apply modulated and modified Hermite pulses (MMHP) for both DS-UWB and TH-UWB systems. Furthermore, MMHP are extended to a novel pulse set referred as limited bandwidth MMHP set in order to reduce various interferences. It is composed of pseudo-orthogonal pulses that have both good auto-correlation characteristics in all orders and low cross-correlation characteristics between different orders. The proposed pulse set also have some specific notches, which can be used to reduce narrow-band interference (NBI). Additionally, we propose a novel pulse shape hopping that employs the proposed MMHP set. Multi-user interference (MUI) and inter-symbol interference (ISI) can be reduced by such a pulse shape hopping scheme for the DS or TH UWB signal format. Simulation results show significant performance improvements by using the proposed UWB system.