Information Efficient High-speed Signalling for Intelligent Computing

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Let's face it - our desire for perpetual connectivity to rest of the world is expensive. Unlike old days when we would be just happy to share a short conversation to our loved ones, these days we conduct business by sharing content including video, voice and files. Obviously, such large data is handled by data centers that transfers and process zettabytes of data every year. Last year, data centers consumed 416 Terawatts and future looks ominous. Obviously, it is alarming when we consider carbon footprint and cooling cost. Federal organizations are considering drastic measures - discussion of internet taxing Hungary in 2014 indicates the gravity of the situation. Such measure may offset the cooling cost but would not address the environment impact. Therefore, there is no substitute to energy efficient interconnect technology that can transfer data consuming lot less electricity and also generates less heat. The proposed research will be exploring ways to enable that. First, we will make the links for `intelligent' by allowing it to allocate resources according to the need. This requires rethinking the link design - adoption of ADC (analog to digital converter) based digital parallel processing is necessary. Second, addressing channel impairments such as inter symbol interference (ISI) increases power consumption and complexity. We will constructively use the ISI that not only simplifies the equalization process, it also allows us to achieve lower BER. Third, we need to find an intelligent way to send the data bits. Traditionally, amplitude of a signal was used represents transmitted data. Obviously, sending multiple bits demands higher amplitude that is not affordable. Therefore, we need to explore other modulation techniques. Finally, links need to be intelligent to take advantage of the `content' in the transmitted data. Overall, exploration of these ideas will continue speed and energy efficiency improvement in post Moore's law era to help design future data centers