Required Reading

Out: 8/28/2008 Due:9/2/2008

You may do this reading assignment in groups of up to 4 and submit one writeup for the entire group (you can also just read and hand your answers in individually). Please be very brief in your answers — I’m really just looking for bullet points.

Please read the paper below and prepare for class by answering the following questions. These questions are meant to help you focus in reading the paper and not waste too much time on it. I encourage you to discuss things with one another before class. Please submit a single write-up for each group that discuss the paper through blackboard. Keep things short — just write down bullet points. One of the reasons I’m making this paper required reading is because it is not a traditional architecture paper and I want you to try and read it as an architect looking at a more circuit paper (the recommended paper at the end is completely circuits, but still relevant and interesting).

  • Ho, R. , Mai, KW and Horowitz, MA (2001) The future of wires. Proceedings of the IEEE, 89(4):490–504. ((URL)) (BibTeX)

Questions:

  1. Why did you read the paper — what information were you most interested in (hint, look at the lecture topic and think of the context of the class and the fact that it’s architecture)?
  2. What are the 4 most important things you learned?
  3. Do global wires offer higher bandwidth than intermediate wires?
  4. Which wires scale with technology and which don’t?
  5. What is the “wire problem”?
  6. How are wires expected to behave in terms of bandwidth and latency?


Other material that is relevant to class

  • Mensink, E. , Schinkel, D. and Klumperink, E. (2007) A 0.28 pJ/b 2Gb/s/ch Transceiver in 90nm CMOS for 10mm On-Chip interconnects. Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2007. ISSCC 2007. Digest of Technical Papers. IEEE International. ((URL)) (BibTeX)
  • ITRSInternational Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors Reports, 2007 Report, Interconnect. http://www.itrs.net/reports.html. ((URL)) (BibTeX)
  • A. P. Jose , G. Patounakis and K. L. Shepard (2006) Pulse current-mode signalling for nearly speed-of-light intrachip communications.. ((URL)) (BibTeX)