Hybrid wire‐surface wave interconnects for next‐generation networks‐on‐chip

Abstract

Networks-on-chip (NoC) is a communication paradigm that has emerged to tackle different on-chip challenges and satisfy different demands in terms of high performance and economical interconnect implementation. However, merely metal-based NoC pursuit offers limited scalability with the relentless technology scaling especially in global communications. To meet the scalability demand, this study proposes a new hybrid architecture empowered by both metal interconnect and Zenneck surface waves interconnects (SWIs). This architecture reduces the NoC average hop count between any communication pairs, which has been reflected as a better average delay and throughput. Furthermore, SWI enables more efficient power dissipation and faster cross the chip signal propagation. The authors' initial results based on a cycle-accurate simulator demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system architecture, such as significant power reduction (23%), large average delay reduction (34%) and higher throughput (35%) compared with regular NoC. These results are achieved with negligible hardware and area overhead. This study explores promising potentials of SWI for future complex global communication.

The Advances, Challenges and Future Possibilities of Millimeter-Wave Chip-to-Chip Interconnections for Multi-Chip Systems

“…Quilt packaging leaves patterns on the die not covered by the encasement materials, enabling direct radiation into the air, potentially reducing path loss. In [54] it is noted that the transmission from on-chip antennas mostly remain trapped as surface waves at the boundary of the dielectric and the silicon substrate of the dies. This reduces loss due to wasted radiation in space considerably favoring the communication across the dies.…”

Scalability of Broadcast Performance in Wireless Network-on-Chip

“…Further down the road towards terahertz operation, graphene technologies are under intense research due to its exceptional properties [43], [44], [45]. Finally, the use of the recently proposed surface wave technology [23], [46] could significantly reduce the power consumption due to its highly improved propagation method. In all cases, we believe that the benefits of the WNoC application could represent a strong technology pull and drive new research on the field.…”

“…The use of a secondary control channel in any of the wireless schemes (to transmit the NACKs in W-CSMA, for instance) would incur into additional overhead, yet much lower than for the data channel. These figures could be reduced by means of transceiver optimization, the system-level techniques described in Section 6.4, or the use of surface wave technologies bringing propagation losses down to transmission line levels [23], [46]. In any case, it is worth noting that the cost of the wireless channel for broadcasts could be in part compensated by the fact that the wired plane can be simplified.…”

Broadcast-Enabled Massive Multicore Architectures: A Wireless RF Approach

“…A recent work has proposed the use of engineered surfaces that support the propagation of Zenneck surface waves [13].…”