INTACTE: an interconnect area, delay, and energy estimation tool for microarchitectural explorations

Prior work on modeling interconnects has focused on optimizing the wire and repeater design for trading off energy and delay, and is largely based on low level circuit parameters. Hence these models are hard to use directly to make high level microarchitectural trade-offs in the initial exploration phase of a design. In this paper, we propose INTACTE, a tool that can be used by architects to get reasonably accurate interconnect area, delay, and power estimates based on a few architecture level parameters for the interconnect such as length, width (in number of bits), frequency, and latency for a specified technology and voltage. The tool uses well known models of interconnect delay and energy taking into account the wire pitch, repeater size, and spacing for a range of voltages and technologies. It then solves an optimization problem of finding the lowest energy interconnect design in terms of the low level circuit parameters, which meets the architectural constraints given as inputs....

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CASES
• Authors: Rahul Nagpal, Arvind Madan, Bharadwaj Amrutur, Y. N. Srikant
• Keywords: CASES 2007, Interconnect, Level Circuit Parameters, Low Level Circuit, System Software