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Efficient high-speed on-chip global interconnects

The continuous miniaturization of integrated circuits has opened the path towards System-on-Chip realizations. Process shrinking into the nanometer regime improves transistor performancewhile the delay of global interconnects, connecting circuit blocks separated by a long distance, significantly increases. In fact, global interconnects extending across a full chip can have a delay corresponding to multiple clock cycles. At the same time, global clock skew constraints, not only between blocks but also along the pipelined interconnects, become even tighter. On-chip interconnects have always been considered RC-like, that is exhibiting long RC-delays. This has motivated large efforts on alternatives such as on-chip optical interconnects, which have not yet been demonstrated, or complex schemes utilizing on-chip F-transmission or pulsed current-mode signaling. In this thesis, we show that well-designed electrical global interconnects, behaving as transmission lines, have the capacity of very high data rates (higher than can be delivered by the actual process) and support near velocity-of-light delay for single-ended voltage-mode signaling, thus mitigating the RC-problem. We critically explore key interconnect performance measures such as data delay, maximum data rate, crosstalk, edge rates and power dissipation. To experimentally demonstrate the feasibility and superior properties of on-chip transmission line interconnects, we have designed and fabricated a test chip carrying a 5 mm long global communication link. Measurements show that we can achieve 3 Gb/s/wire over the 5 mm long, repeaterless on-chip bus implemented in a standard 0.18 μm CMOS process, achieving a signal velocity of 1/3 of the velocity of light in vacuum. To manage the problems due to global wire delays, we describe and implement a Synchronous Latency Insensitive Design (SLID) scheme, based on source-synchronous data transfer between blocks and data re-timing at the receiving block. The SLIDtechnique not onlymitigates unknown globalwire delays, but also removes the need for controlling global clock skew. The high-performance and high robustness capability of the SLID-method is practically demonstrated through a successful implementation of a SLID-based, 5.4 mm long, on-chip global bus, supporting 3 Gb/s/wire and dynamically accepting ± 2 clock cycles of data-clock skew, in a standard 0.18 μm CMOS porcess. In the context of technology scaling, there is a tendency for interconnects to dominate chip power dissipation due to their large total capacitance. In this thesis we address the problem of interconnect power dissipation by proposing and analyzing a transition-energy cost model aimed for efficient power estimation of performancecritical buses. The model, which includes properties that closely capture effects present in high-performance VLSI buses, can be used to more accurately determine the energy benefits of e.g. transition coding of bus topologies. We further show a power optimization scheme based on appropriate choice of reduced voltage swing of the interconnect and scaling of receiver amplifier. Finally, the power saving impact of swing reduction in combination with a sense-amplifying flip-flop receiver is shown on a microprocessor cache bus architecture used in industry.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-7123
Date January 2006
CreatorsCaputa, Peter
PublisherLinköpings universitet, Elektroniska komponenter, Linköpings universitet, Tekniska högskolan, Institutionen för systemteknik
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDoctoral thesis, comprehensive summary, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
RelationLinköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations, 0345-7524 ; 992

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