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Signaling Techniques for NoC

Ethiopia Nigussie, Johanna Tuominen, Jouni Isoaho, Signaling Techniques for NoC. TUCS Technical Reports 612, Turku Centre for Computer Science, 2004.

Abstract:

The gate length of a few tens of a nanometer for CMOS has become a
distinct possibility due to technology scaling. Furthermore, the
amount of transistors in a single die is increasing steadily over
time towards gigascale integration (GSI) level. This development
creates a noise and power dissipation problems into a system
design. In addition to this, signaling over nanometer
interconnects represents a major bottleneck in ULSI systems due to
the dominant limitation of signal propagation delays. To a large
extent, the on-chip signaling technique determines the
reliability, speed, and power consumption of a network-on-chip
(NoC). An efficient on-chip signaling scheme is the one that
maximizes the data rate per pin, minimizes power dissipation, and
provides good noise immunity. Such signaling convention can
dramatically increase available data rate and hence system
performance.


Three signaling techniques, namely voltage- and current-mode
differential signaling and simultaneous current-mode bidirectional
signaling, were selected from the on-chip signaling scheme, which
has a promising feature for the future technology scaling impact
as a case study. Interconnects were modeled using transmission
line model from Spectre and lumped RC-model. For the latter, the
length of the interconnect varied from 0.1 mm to 3 mm. Finally, a
32-bit bus was constructed by utilizing the above mention
techniques. Simulation and performance analysis was carried out
for 0.18 um technology.

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BibTeX entry:

@TECHREPORT{tNiTuIs04a,
  title = {Signaling Techniques for NoC},
  author = {Nigussie, Ethiopia and Tuominen, Johanna and Isoaho, Jouni},
  number = {612},
  series = {TUCS Technical Reports},
  publisher = {Turku Centre for Computer Science},
  year = {2004},
  keywords = {signaling, interconnect, noise, power consumption},
  ISBN = {952-12-1357-4},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Communication Systems (ComSys)

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