Efficient High-Speed On-Chip Global Interconnects

The continuous miniaturization of integrated circuits has opened the path towards System-on-Chip realizations. Process shrinking into the nanometer regime improves transistor performance while the delay of global interconnects, connecting circuit blocks separated by a long distance, significantly increases. In fact, global interconnects extending across a full chip can have a delay corresponding to multiple clock cycles. At the same time, global clock skew constraints, not only between blocks but also along the pipelined interconnects, become even tighter. On-chip interconnects have always been considered RC-like, that is exhibiting long RC-delays. This has motivated large efforts on alternatives such as on-chip optical interconnects, which have not yet been demonstrated, or complex schemes utilizing on-chip RF-transmission or pulsed current-mode signaling. In this thesis, we show that well-designed electrical global interconnects, behaving as transmission lines, have the capacity of very high data rates (higher than can be delivered by the actual process) and support near velocity-of-light delay for single-ended voltage-mode signaling, thus mitigating the RC-problem. We critically explore key interconnect performance measures such as data delay, maximum data rate, crosstalk, edge rates and power dissipation. To experimentally demonstrate the feasibility and superior properties of on-chip transmission line interconnects, we have designed and fabricated a test chip carrying a 5 mm long global communication link. Measurements show that we can achieve 3 Gb/s/wire over the 5 mm long, repeaterless on-chip bus implemented in a standard 0.18 μm CMOS process, achieving a signal velocity of 1/3 of the velocity of light in vacuum. To manage the problems due to global wire delays, we describe and implement a Synchronous Latency Insensitive Design (SLID) scheme, based on sourcesynchronous data transfer between blocks and data re-timing at the receiving block. The SLID-technique not only mitigates unknown global wire delays, but also removes the need for controlling global clock skew. The high-performance and high robustness capability of the SLID-method is practically demonstrated through a successful implementation of a SLID-based, 5.4 mm long, on-chip global bus, supporting 3 Gb/s/wire and dynamically accepting ± 2 clock cycles of