Improve Chip Pin Performance Using Optical Interconnects

—With the fast development of processor chips, power-efficient, high-bandwidth, and low-latency interchip interconnects become more and more important. Studies show that the bandwidth of traditional parallel interconnects with low I/O clock frequencies will become bottlenecks in the near future. To solve this problem, two types of high-bandwidth interchip interconnects are developed. Low-swing differential electrical interconnects have widely been used in high-speed I/O designs. On the other hand, optical interconnects promise high bandwidth, low latency, and could improve the chip pin performance for manycore processors. They are becoming potential alternatives for electrical interconnects. This paper systematically models these two types of interconnects in terms of crosstalk noises, attenuation, and receiver sensitivities. Based on the proposed models, we developed optical and electrical interfaces and links (OEIL) and an analysis tool for OEIL. The OEIL can be used to analyze th...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: TVLSI
• Authors: Zhehui Wang, Jiang Xu, Peng Yang, Xuan Wang, Zhe Wang, Luan Huu Kinh Duong, Zhifei Wang, Rafael Kioji Vivas Maeda, Haoran Li
• Keywords: TVLSI 2016