Required Reading 1 — submit on Gradescope

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 a few bullet points, but want to make sure you take it seriously.

Please read the two papers 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 these papers required reading is because they are not traditional architecture papers. I want you to try and read as an architect looking at more circuit papers.

There are many other important related papers and I list a few recommended ones below.

If you are trying to access from off campus: You can access through the UT library web site, or use the EZProxy Redirect Chrome extension.

  • Ho, R. , Mai, KW and Horowitz, MA (2001) The future of wires. Proceedings of the IEEE, 89(4):490–504. ((URL)) (BibTeX)
  • Poulton, J.W. , Dally, W.J. , Chen, X. , Eyles, J.G. , Greer, T.H. , Tell, S.G. , Wilson, J.M. and Gray, C.T. (2013) A 0.54 pJ/b 20 Gb/s Ground-Referenced Single-Ended Short-Reach Serial Link in 28 nm CMOS for Advanced Packaging Applications. Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of, 48(12):3206–3218. ((URL)) (BibTeX)

Questions (compare and contrast the two papers):

  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 important/interesting/relevant papers

Other than traditional wires, there are more exotic signaling techniques and some optical interconnect ideas. Some papers below (more may follow).

  • Sharma, Debendra Das , Pasdast, Gerald , Qian, Zhiguo and Aygun, Kemal (2022) Universal chiplet interconnect express (UCIe): An open industry standard for innovations with chiplets at package level. IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology, 12(9):1423–1431. ((URL)) (BibTeX)
  • Sheikh, Farhana , Nagisetty, Ramune , Karnik, Tanay and Kehlet, David (2021) 2.5 D and 3D heterogeneous integration: emerging applications. IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine, 13(4):77–87. ((URL)) (BibTeX)
  • Mahajan, Ravi , Sankman, Robert , Patel, Neha , Kim, Dae-Woo , Aygun, Kemal , Qian, Zhiguo , Mekonnen, Yidnekachew , Salama, Islam , Sharan, Sujit , Iyengar, Deepti and others (2016) Embedded multi-die interconnect bridge (EMIB)—a high density, high bandwidth packaging interconnect. In 2016 IEEE 66th Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC)., pages 557–565, . IEEE. ((URL)) (BibTeX)
  • Vantrease, Dana , Schreiber, Robert , Monchiero, Matteo , McLaren, Moray , Jouppi, Norman P. , Fiorentino, Marco , Davis, Al , Binkert, Nathan , Beausoleil, Raymond G. and Ahn, Jung Ho (2008) Corona: System Implications of Emerging Nanophotonic Technology. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture., pages 153–164. ((URL)) (BibTeX)
  • Postman, J and Chiang, P. (2011) Energy-efficient transceiver circuits for short-range on-chip interconnects. In Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), 2011 IEEE. Sept. (BibTeX)