Optimized Terabit-per-second Chip-to-Chip Communication over Heterogeneous Interconnect Fabrics

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Our ability to communicate information into and out of integrated circuits is increasingly a bottleneck in all forms of computation and communication. Integrated circuit (IC) packaging and interconnect technologies have not, unfortunately, benefited from Moore's Law scaling. Thus, it has fallen to the designers of transmitter/receiver (transceiver) circuits to communicate information at higher speed over a fixed number of links within a relatively fixed power budget. Transceiver energy efficiency, density, and data rates have simultaneously improved for over a decade, but recently transceiver circuits have begun occupying an increasing fraction of the cost and power consumption of data-intensive ICs. Thus, paradigm shifts are required in the wide diversity of chip-to-chip interconnect inside modern infrastructure and enterprise computing, storage, and networking equipment. Typically, only a small minority of links exhibit worst-case combinations of channel loss and noise. The vast majority of links exhibit only modest loss and noise. Unfortunately, transceivers have been conservatively overdesigned for the worst-case conditions. Such over-design will be intolerable at next-generation data rates. Thus, this project seeks modulation and coding techniques suited to a wide diversity of link conditions, and circuits optimized for the lowest possible power consumption in all scenarios. We will also research optical communication technologies that will allow low-power and low-cost optical links to replace the worst-case electrical links in current systems. Furthermore, we seek methodologies for intelligent automatic co-optimization of all transceiver circuits (hundreds, or even thousands) in a piece of equipment to meet its instantaneous performance demands with minimal power consumption. The project will be undertaken with an industry-leading partner, whose support includes access to advanced FinFET IC technologies not normally available to academics. The unique training afforded to students and the research outcomes themselves promise tremendous benefits to Canada's large ICT sector, which increasingly underlies our society as a whole.