A Bidirectional- and Multi-Drop-Transmission-Line Interconnect for Multipoint-to-Multipoint On-Chip Communications

Highly Energy-Efficient On-Chip Pulsed-Current-Mode Transmission Line Interconnect

“…This indicates that the delay characteristics of the proposed PTLIs are better than those of other on-chip interconnects. Energy per bit of our interconnects is almost the same as that reported in a previous study (Ito et al, 2008) and is greater than that reported in another study (Ito et al, 2007). The operating frequency in the previous study (Ito et al, 2007) is higher than that of the proposed PTLI.…”

“…Maximum bit-rate comparable to that of TLIs can be achieved by using RC lines in a bundle; however, this would imply that the RC lines will occupy virtually the same area as the TLIs. The area per bit of the proposed point-to-point PTLI is almost equal to that of the other point-to-point TLIs Ito et al, 2005;Ishii et al, 2006;Ito et al, 2007Ito et al, , 2008Lee et al, 2004). The area per bit of the proposed multi-drop PTLI is the equal to the bidirectional and multi-drop transmission line interconnects (Ito et al, 2008).…”

“…Our Tx outputs pulse-shaped RZ signals and consumes power only during signal transitions. Tx has high output impedance in the standby states, and our Tx and Rx can be applied to bidirectional and multi-drop signaling; this can save the area occupied by the TLIs and would improve the extensibility of on-chip networks (Ito et al, 2008). This paper is organized as follows.…”

“…Thus, the proposed Tx can save power during low bit-rate transmissions and signaling with a low activity factor. The output impedance of Tx is high in the steady states; this enables multi-drop and bidirectional signal transmissions without the degradation of signal integrity (Ito et al, 2008). Figure 10 shows a result of transient simulation at 10 Gb/s.…”

A Survey Addressing On-Chip Interconnect: Energy and Reliability Considerations

“…However, the large transceiver areas and wide multilayer wire paths these approaches use to achieve the required inductance and low resistance properties results in worse bit-rate per wire area figures of merit than simpler RC-mode signaling. However, at the architectural level a small number of global, lowlatency communication links, such as that proposed in [26] for network flow control or multicast signaling as proposed in [27] could be used to provide efficient automatic repeat request (ARQ) signaling in error detect and recover schemes, such as described using conventional signals in [5] and are deserving of further exploration.…”