i4 p10 Optical Interconnect for High-End Computer Systems

RECENT ADVANCES IN silicon photonic technologies
offer the potential of closely integrated optical
communication and VLSI computation

Scaling: Background

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Figure 1 raises a natural question: how do we maintain this performance curve?

Thus, gate delay and gates per clock, whose product
gives clock frequency, appear to scale either flatly
or minimally: less than 40% per generation, or 13%
per year.

However, continued scaling of Moore’s law
appears to be in jeopardy: partly because dimensions
are rapidly approaching atomic size, and atoms do
not scale, but mostly because global economic realities
will increasingly limit financial investment into the semiconductor market.

Multichip packages using optics

i4 p6 Guest Editors’ Introduction: Promises and Challenges of Novel Interconnect Technologies

COMMERCIAL DESIGNS currently integrate tens to
hundreds of embedded functional and storage blocks
in a monolithic SoC, and the number is expected to
increase significantly in the near future.

With the well-known trend of continued CMOS
scaling in accordance with Moore’s law, it’s projected
that traditional on-chip interconnect systems will
soon be very limited in meeting the performance
needs and specifications of ICs and SoCs.

The conventional 2D copper-based IC is inherently
limited because of the planar structure’s geometrical
constraints.
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In ‘‘Carbon Nanomaterials: The Ideal Interconnect
Technology for Next-Generation ICs,’’ Hong Li, Chuan
Xu, and Kaustav Banerjee present a comprehensive
overview of state-of-the-art carbon nanomaterials
carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene nanoribbons
(GNRs), as next-generation interconnect technology.

The next article is ‘‘Short-Range, Wireless Interconnect
within a Computing Chassis: Design Challenges,’’
by Patrick Chiang et al.

The fourth article, ‘‘Wireless Interconnect and the
Potential for Carbon Nanotubes’’ by Alireza Nojeh
and Andre Ivanov, explores the possibility of creating
an on-chip wireless communication network using
CNT antennas.

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