The last barrier: On-chip antennas

The last two decades have witnessed unprecedented development in the field of integrated circuits (ICs), driven by aggressive transistor scaling, unmatched levels of integration, advanced foundry processes, low cost, and improved yields. On one hand, digital integration, following the empirical prediction by Gordon Moore [1], has resulted in billions of transistors integrated in a few square millimeters, using processes that span the commercial range of 45 nm to 32 nm nodes [2] and transistors as small as 9 nm already demonstrated in research studies [3]. On the other hand, analog integration has also seen tremendous development (albeit at a relatively slower pace) resulting in highly integrated, multiband, multistandard transceivers for wireless communications [4][5]. © 2000-2012 IEEE.