Prediction and Comparison of High-Performance On-Chip Global Interconnection

• Published in: IEEE transactions on very large scale integration (VLSI) systems 2011-07, Vol.19 (7), p.1154-1166
• Main Authors: Yulei Zhang, Xiang Hu, Deutsch, A., Engin, A. E., Buckwalter, J. F., Chung-Kuan Cheng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Categories; Degradation; Delay; Design engineering; Design. Technologies. Operation analysis. Testing; Electronic equipment and fabrication. Passive components, printed wiring boards, connectics; Electronics; Equalization; Exact sciences and technology; Integrated circuits; Interconnect; Interconnection; Intersymbol interference; On-chip global interconnect; passive equalization; Performance analysis; performance prediction; Power system interconnection; Power transmission lines; Reinforced concrete; Repeaters; Semiconductor electronics. Microelectronics. Optoelectronics. Solid state devices; Signal integrity; System-on-a-chip; Throughput; transmission line; Very large scale integration; Wire
• ISSN: 1063-8210; 1557-9999
• DOI: 10.1109/TVLSI.2010.2047415

As process technology scales, numerous interconnect schemes have been proposed to mitigate the performance degradation caused by the scaling of on-chip global wires. In this paper, we review current on-chip global interconnect structures and develop simple models to analyze their architecture-level performance. We propose a general framework to design and optimize a new category of global interconnect based on on-chip transmission line (T-line) technology. We perform a group of experiments using six different global interconnection structures to discover their differences in terms of latency, energy per bit, throughput, area, and signal integrity over several technology nodes. Our results show that T-line structures have the potential to outperform conventional repeated RC wires at future technology nodes to achieve higher performance while using less power and improving the reliability of wire communication. Our results also show that on-chip equalization is helpful to improve throughput, signal integrity, and power efficiency.