Sub-THz communication systems: pushing the capabilities of silicon

Silicon-based technologies have been researched extensively over the past few decades, but one ongoing problem has been bringing these technologies into the sub-THz regime. For wireless communications, these bands exhibit potential for massive improvements to bandwidth, data rates, etc., but overcoming the limits of operating frequency to allow devices to enter the sub-THz regime has proven challenging when designing working systems. Despite this, researchers have been developing novel ways to construct transceiver systems above 200 GHz. In this article, we showcase interesting designs that push the envelope towards more powerful, faster, and more useful silicon-based transceiver systems. We discuss transmitter systems grouped by modulation schemes as well as incoherent and coherent receiver systems. This allows us to point out the specific difficulties seen throughout these works and describe the direction needed to improve these systems. Finally, we discuss the future direction and application of silicon-based wireless communication systems as they move towards sub-THz regions.