Overcoming the Challenges for Multichip Integration: A Wireless Interconnect Approach

The physical limitations in the area, power density, and yield restrict the scalability of the single-chip multicore system to a relatively small number of cores. Instead of having a large chip, aggregating multiple smaller chips can overcome these physical limitations. Combining multiple dies can be done either by stacking vertically or by placing side-by-side on the same substrate within a single package. However, in order to be widely accepted, both multichip integration techniques need to overcome significant challenges. In the horizontally integrated multichip system, traditional inter-chip I/O does not scale well with technology scaling due to limitations of the pitch. Moreover, to transfer data between cores or memory components from one chip to another, state-of-the-art inter-chip communication over wireline channels require data signals to travel from internal nets to the peripheral I/O ports and then get routed over the inter-chip channels to the I/O port of the destination chip. Following this, the data is finally routed from the I/O to internal nets of the target chip over a wireline interconnect fabric. This multi-hop communication increases energy consumption while decreasing data bandwidth in a multichip system. On the other hand, in vertically integrated multichip system, the high power density resulting from the placement of computational components on top of each other aggravates the thermal issues of the chip leading to degraded performance and reduced reliability. Liquid cooling through microfluidic channels can provide cooling capabilities required for effective management of chip temperatures in vertical integration. However, to reduce the mechanical stresses and at the same time, to ensure temperature uniformity and adequate cooling competencies, the height and width of the microchannels need to be increased. This limits the area available to route Through-Silicon-Vias (TSVs) across the cooling layers and make the co-existence and co-design of TSVs and microchannels extreamly challenging. Research in recent years has demonstrated that on-chip and off-chip wireless interconnects are capable of establishing radio communications within as well as between multiple chips. The primary goal of this dissertation is to propose design principals targeting both horizontally and vertically integrated multichip system to provide high bandwidth, low latency, and energy efficient data communication by utilizing mm-wave wireless interconnects. The proposed solution has two parts: the first part proposes design methodology of a seamless hybrid wired and wireless interconnection network for the horizontally integrated multichip system to enable direct chip-to-chip communication between internal cores. Whereas the second part proposes a Wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC) architecture for the vertically integrated multichip system to realize data communication across interlayer microfluidic coolers eliminating the need to place and route signal TSVs through the cooling layers. The integration of wireless interconnect will significantly reduce the complexity of the co-design of TSV based interconnects and microchannel based interlayer cooling. Finally, this dissertation presents a combined trade-off evaluation of such wireless integration system in both horizontal and vertical sense and provides future directions for the design of the multichip system

Experimental Evaluation and Comparison of Time-Multiplexed Multi-FPGA Routing Architectures

Emulating large complex designs require multi-FPGA systems (MFS). However, inter-FPGA communication is confronted by the challenge of lack of interconnect capacity due to limited number of FPGA input/output (I/O) pins. Serializing parallel signals onto a single trace effectively addresses the limited I/O pin obstacle. Besides the multiplexing scheme and multiplexing ratio (number of inter-FPGA signals per trace), the choice of the MFS routing architecture also affect the critical path latency. The routing architecture of an MFS is the interconnection pattern of FPGAs, fixed wires and/or programmable interconnect chips. Performance of existing MFS routing architectures is also limited by off-chip interface selection. In this dissertation we proposed novel 2D and 3D latency-optimized time-multiplexed MFS routing architectures. We used rigorous experimental approach and real sequential benchmark circuits to evaluate and compare the proposed and existing MFS routing architectures. This research provides a new insight into the encouraging effects of using off-chip optical interface and three dimensional MFS routing architectures. The vertical stacking results in shorter off-chip links improving the overall system frequency with the additional advantage of smaller footprint area. The proposed 3D architectures employed serialized interconnect between intra-plane and inter-plane FPGAs to address the pin limitation problem. Additionally, all off-chip links are replaced by optical fibers that exhibited latency improvement and resulted in faster MFS. Results indicated that exploiting third dimension provided latency and area improvements as compared to 2D MFS. We also proposed latency-optimized planar 2D MFS architectures in which electrical interconnections are replaced by optical interface in same spatial distribution. Performance evaluation and comparison showed that the proposed architectures have reduced critical path delay and system frequency improvement as compared to conventional MFS. We also experimentally evaluated and compared the system performance of three inter-FPGA communication schemes i.e. Logic Multiplexing, SERDES and MGT in conjunction with two routing architectures i.e. Completely Connected Graph (CCG) and TORUS. Experimental results showed that SERDES attained maximum frequency than the other two schemes. However, for very high multiplexing ratios, the performance of SERDES & MGT became comparable

System-Level Analysis for Integrated Power Amplifier Design in mmWave Consumer Wireless Communications

System-level specifications for the design of integrated power amplifiers in mmWave wireless communications are derived in the paper. To this aim emerging standards for consumer applications such as wireless ultra-high definition (UHD) multimedia streaming or Gbit wireless LAN are considered (WirelessHD, WiGig, ECMA387, IEEE.802.11.ad, IEEE802.15.3c and upcoming 5G). A power amplifier design in 65 nm CMOS Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology, targeting a 9 GHz UWB window from 57 to 66 GHz, is also proposed. To increase the power delivered to the antenna up to 18 mW, being still in the limit of maximum 1 dB compression point, multiple PA cores have been combined through a Wilkinson power combiner, but other solutions can be also explored for a better power efficiency and linearity

성능과 용량 향상을 위한 적층형 메모리 구조

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 융합과학기술대학원 융합과학부(지능형융합시스템전공), 2019. 2. 안정호.The advance of DRAM manufacturing technology slows down, whereas the density and performance needs of DRAM continue to increase. This desire has motivated the industry to explore emerging Non-Volatile Memory (e.g., 3D XPoint) and the high-density DRAM (e.g., Managed DRAM Solution). Since such memory technologies increase the density at the cost of longer latency, lower bandwidth, or both, it is essential to use them with fast memory (e.g., conventional DRAM) to which hot pages are transferred at runtime. Nonetheless, we observe that page transfers to fast memory often block memory channels from servicing memory requests from applications for a long period. This in turn significantly increases the high-percentile response time of latency-sensitive applications. In this thesis, we propose a high-density managed DRAM architecture, dubbed 3D-XPath for applications demanding both low latency and high capacity for memory. 3D-XPath DRAM stacks conventional DRAM dies with high-density DRAM dies explored in this thesis and connects these DRAM dies with 3D-XPath. Especially, 3D-XPath allows unused memory channels to service memory requests from applications when primary channels supposed to handle the memory requests are blocked by page transfers at given moments, considerably increasing the high-percentile response time. This can also improve the throughput of applications frequently copying memory blocks between kernel and user memory spaces. Our evaluation shows that 3D-XPath DRAM decreases high-percentile response time of latency-sensitive applications by ∼30% while improving the throughput of an I/O-intensive applications by ∼39%, compared with DRAM without 3D-XPath. Recent computer systems are evolving toward the integration of more CPU cores into a single socket, which require higher memory bandwidth and capacity. Increasing the number of channels per socket is a common solution to the bandwidth demand and to better utilize these increased channels, data bus width is reduced and burst length is increased. However, this longer burst length brings increased DRAM access latency. On the memory capacity side, process scaling has been the answer for decades, but cell capacitance now limits how small a cell could be. 3D stacked memory solves this problem by stacking dies on top of other dies. We made a key observation in real multicore machine that multiple memory controllers are always not fully utilized on SPEC CPU 2006 rate benchmark. To bring these idle channels into play, we proposed memory channel sharing architecture to boost peak bandwidth of one memory channel and reduce the burst latency on 3D stacked memory. By channel sharing, the total performance on multi-programmed workloads and multi-threaded workloads improved up to respectively 4.3% and 3.6% and the average read latency reduced up to 8.22% and 10.18%.DRAM 제조 기술의 발전은 속도가 느려지는 반면 DRAM의 밀도 및 성능 요구는 계속 증가하고 있다. 이러한 요구로 인해 새로운 비 휘발성 메모리(예: 3D-XPoint) 및 고밀도 DRAM(예: Managed asymmetric latency DRAM Solution)이 등장하였다. 이러한 고밀도 메모리 기술은 긴 레이턴시, 낮은 대역폭 또는 두 가지 모두를 사용하는 방식으로 밀도를 증가시키기 때문에 성능이 좋지 않아, 핫 페이지를 고속 메모리(예: 일반 DRAM)로 스왑되는 저용량의 고속 메모리가 동시에 사용되는 것이 일반적이다. 이러한 스왑 과정에서 빠른 메모리로의 페이지 전송이 일반적인 응용프로그램의 메모리 요청을 오랫동안 처리하지 못하도록 하기 때문에, 대기 시간에 민감한 응용 프로그램의 백분위 응답 시간을 크게 증가시켜, 응답 시간의 표준 편차를 증가시킨다. 이러한 문제를 해결하기 위해 본 학위 논문에서는 저 지연시간 및 고용량 메모리를 요구하는 애플리케이션을 위해 3D-XPath, 즉 고밀도 관리 DRAM 아키텍처를 제안한다. 이러한 3D-톔소를 집적한 DRAM은 저속의 고밀도 DRAM 다이를 기존의 일반적인 DRAM 다이와 동시에 한 칩에 적층하고, DRAM 다이끼리는 제안하는 3D-XPath 하드웨어를 통해 연결된다. 이러한 3D-XPath는 핫 페이지 스왑이 일어나는 동안 응용프로그램의 메모리 요청을 차단하지 않고 사용량이 적은 메모리 채널로 핫 페이지 스왑을 처리 할 수 있도록 하여, 데이터 집중 응용 프로그램의 백분위 응답 시간을 개선시킨다. 또한 제안하는 하드웨어 구조를 사용하여, 추가적으로 O/S 커널과 유저 스페이스 간의 메모리 블록을 자주 복사하는 응용 프로그램의 처리량을 향상시킬 수 있다. 이러한 3D-XPath DRAM은 3D-XPath가 없는 DRAM에 비해 I/O 집약적인 응용프로그램의 처리량을 최대 39 % 향상시키면서 레이턴시에 민감한 응용 프로그램의 높은 백분위 응답 시간을 최대 30 %까지 감소시킬 수 있다. 또한 최근의 컴퓨터 시스템은 보다 많은 메모리 대역폭과 용량을 필요로하는 더 많은 CPU 코어를 단일 소켓으로 통합하는 방향으로 진화하고 있다. 이러한 소켓 당 채널 수를 늘리는 것은 대역폭 요구에 대한 일반적인 해결책이며, 최신의 DRAM 인터페이스의 발전 양상은 증가한 채널을 보다 잘 활용하기 위해 데이터 버스 폭이 감소되고 버스트 길이가 증가한다. 그러나 길어진 버스트 길이는 DRAM 액세스 대기 시간을 증가시킨다. 추가적으로 최신의 응용프로그램은 더 많은 메모리 용량을 요구하며, 미세 공정으로 메모리 용량을 증가시키는 방법론은 수십 년 동안 사용되었지만, 20 nm 이하의 미세공정에서는 더 이상 공정 미세화를 통해 메모리 밀도를 증가시키기가 어려운 상황이며, 적층형 메모리를 사용하여 용량을 증가시키는 방법을 사용한다. 이러한 상황에서, 실제 최신의 멀티코어 머신에서 SPEC CPU 2006 응용프로그램을 멀티코어에서 실행하였을 때, 항상 시스템의 모든 메모리 컨트롤러가 완전히 활용되지 않는다는 사실을 관찰했다. 이러한 유휴 채널을 사용하기 위해 하나의 메모리 채널의 피크 대역폭을 높이고 3D 스택 메모리의 버스트 대기 시간을 줄이기 위해 본 학위 논문에서는 메모리 채널 공유 아키텍처를 제안하였으며, 하드웨어 블록을 제안하였다. 이러한 채널 공유를 통해 멀티 프로그램 된 응용프로그램 및 다중 스레드 응용프로그램 성능이 각각 4.3 % 및 3.6 %로 향상되었으며 평균 읽기 대기 시간은 8.22 % 및 10.18 %로 감소하였다.Contents Abstract i Contents iv List of Figures vi List of Tables viii Introduction 1 1.1 3D-XPath: High-Density Managed DRAM Architecture with Cost-effective Alternative Paths for Memory Transactions 5 1.2 Boosting Bandwidth – Dynamic Channel Sharing on 3D Stacked Memory 9 1.3 Research contribution 13 1.4 Outline 14 3D-stacked Heterogeneous Memory Architecture with Cost-effective Extra Block Transfer Paths 17 2.1 Background 17 2.1.1 Heterogeneous Main Memory Systems 17 2.1.2 Specialized DRAM 19 2.1.3 3D-stacked Memory 22 2.2 HIGH-DENSITY DRAM ARCHITECTURE 27 2.2.1 Key Design Challenges 29 2.2.2 Plausible High-density DRAM Designs 33 2.3 3D-STACKED DRAM WITH ALTERNATIVE PATHS FOR MEMORY TRANSACTIONS 37 2.3.1 3D-XPath Architecture 41 2.3.2 3D-XPath Management 46 2.4 EXPERIMENTAL METHODOLOGY 52 2.5 EVALUATION 56 2.5.1 OLDI Workloads 56 2.5.2 Non-OLDI Workloads 61 2.5.3 Sensitivity Analysis 66 2.6 RELATED WORK 70 Boosting bandwidth –Dynamic Channel Sharing on 3D Stacked Memory 72 3.1 Background: Memory Operations 72 3.1.1. Memory Controller 72 3.1.2 DRAM column access sequence 73 3.2 Related Work 74 3.3. CHANNEL SHARING ENABLED MEMORY SYSTEM 76 3.3.1 Hardware Requirements 78 3.3.2 Operation Sequence 81 3.4 Analysis 87 3.4.1 Experiment Environment 87 3.4.2 Performance 88 3.4.3 Overhead 90 CONCLUSION 92 REFERENCES 94 국문초록 107Docto

A review of advances in pixel detectors for experiments with high rate and radiation

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments ATLAS and CMS have established hybrid pixel detectors as the instrument of choice for particle tracking and vertexing in high rate and radiation environments, as they operate close to the LHC interaction points. With the High Luminosity-LHC upgrade now in sight, for which the tracking detectors will be completely replaced, new generations of pixel detectors are being devised. They have to address enormous challenges in terms of data throughput and radiation levels, ionizing and non-ionizing, that harm the sensing and readout parts of pixel detectors alike. Advances in microelectronics and microprocessing technologies now enable large scale detector designs with unprecedented performance in measurement precision (space and time), radiation hard sensors and readout chips, hybridization techniques, lightweight supports, and fully monolithic approaches to meet these challenges. This paper reviews the world-wide effort on these developments.Comment: 84 pages with 46 figures. Review article.For submission to Rep. Prog. Phy

Integrated Distributed Amplifiers for Ultra-Wideband BiCMOS Receivers Operating at Millimeter-Wave Frequencies

Millimetre-wave technology is used for applications such as telecommunications and imaging. For both applications, the bandwidth of existing systems has to be increased to support higher data rates and finer imaging resolutions. Millimetrewave circuits with very large bandwidths are developed in this thesis. The focus is put on amplifiers and the on-chip integration of the amplifiers with antennas. Circuit prototypes, fabricated in a commercially available 130nm Silicon-Germanium (SiGe) Bipolar Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (BiCMOS) process, validated the developed techniques. Cutting-edge performances have been achieved in the field of distributed and resonant-matched amplifiers, as well as in that of the antenna-amplifier co-integration. Examples are as follows: - A novel cascode gain-cell with three transistors was conceived. By means of transconductance peaking towards high frequencies, the losses of the synthetic line can be compensated up to higher frequencies. The properties were analytically derived and explained. Experimental demonstration validated the technique by a Traveling-Wave Amplifier (TWA) able to produce 10 dB of gain over a frequency band of 170GHz.# - Two Cascaded Single-Stage Distributed Amplifiers (CSSDAs) have been demonstrated. The first CSSDA, optimized for low power consumption, requires less than 20mW to provide 10 dB of gain over a frequency band of 130 GHz. The second amplifier was designed for high-frequency operation and works up to 250 GHz leading to a record bandwidth for distributed amplifiers in SiGe technology. - The first complete CSSDA circuit analysis as function of all key parameters was presented. The typical degradation of the CSSDA output matching towards high frequencies was analytically quantified. A balanced architecture was then introduced to retain the frequency-response advantages of CSSDAs and yet ensure matching over the frequency band of interested. A circuit prototype validated experimentally the technique. - The first traveling-wave power combiner and divider capable of operation from the MHz range up to 200 GHz were demonstrated. The circuits improved the state of the art of the maximum frequency of operation and the bandwidth by a factor of five. - A resonant-matched balanced amplifier was demonstrated with a centre frequency of 185 GHz, 10 dB of gain and a 55GHz wide –3 dB-bandwidth. The power consumption of the amplifier is 16.8mW, one of the lowest for this circuit class, while the bandwidth is the broadest reported in literature for resonant-matched amplifiers in SiGe technology

Contactless Test Access Mechanism for 3D IC

3D IC integration presents many advantages over the current 2D IC integration. It has the potential to reduce the power consumption and the physical size while supporting higher bandwidth and processing speed. Through Silicon Via’s (TSVs) are vertical interconnects between different layers of 3D ICs with a typical 5μm diameter and 50μm length. To test a 3D IC, an access mechanism is needed to apply test vectors to TSVs and observe their responses. However, TSVs are too small for access by current wafer probes and direct TSV probing may affect their physical integrity. In addition, the probe needles for direct TSV probing must be cleaned or replaced frequently. Contactless probing method resolves most of the TSV probing problems and can be employed for small-pitch TSVs. In this dissertation, contactless test access mechanisms for 3D IC have been explored using capacitive and inductive coupling techniques. Circuit models for capacitive and inductive communication links are extracted using 3D full-wave simulations and then circuit level simulations are carried out using Advanced Design System (ADS) design environment to verify the results. The effects of cross-talk and misalignment on the communication link have been investigated. A contactless TSV probing method using capacitive coupling is proposed and simulated. A prototype was fabricated using TSMC 65nm CMOS technology to verify the proposed method. The measurement results on the fabricated prototype show that this TSV probing scheme presents -55dB insertion loss at 1GHz frequency and maintains higher than 35dB signal-to-noise ratio within 5µm distance. A microscale contactless probe based on the principle of resonant inductive coupling has also been designed and simulated. Experimental measurements on a prototype fabricated in TSMC 65nm CMOS technology indicate that the data signal on the TSV can be reconstructed when the distance between the TSV and the probe remains less than 15µm

Performance Analysis of a 3D Wireless Massively Parallel Computer

In previous work, the authors presented a 3D hexagonal wireless direct-interconnect network for a massively parallel computer, with a focus on analysing processor utilisation. In this study, we consider the characteristics of such an architecture in terms of link utilisation and power consumption. We have applied a store-and-forward packet-switching algorithm to both our proposed architecture and a traditional wired 5D direct network (the same as IBM’s Blue Gene). Simulations show that for small and medium-size networks the link utility of the proposed architecture is comparable with (and in some cases even better than) traditional 5D networks. This work demonstrates that there is a potential for wireless processing array concepts to address High-Performance Computing (HPC) challenges whilst alleviating some significant physical construction drawbacks of traditional systems

An Interconnection Architecture for Seamless Inter and Intra-Chip Communication Using Wireless Links

As semiconductor technologies continues to scale, more and more cores are being integrated on the same multicore chip. This increase in complexity poses the challenge of efficient data transfer between these cores. Several on-chip network architectures are proposed to improve the design flexibility and communication efficiency of such multicore chips. However, in a larger system consisting of several multicore chips across a board or in a System-in-Package (SiP), the performance is limited by the communication among and within these chips. Such systems, most commonly found within computing modules in typical data center nodes or server racks, are in dire need of an efficient interconnection architecture. Conventional interchip communication using wireline links involve routing the data from the internal cores to the peripheral I/O ports, travelling over the interchip channels to the destination chip, and finally getting routed from the I/O to the internal cores there. This multihop communication increases latency and energy consumption while decreasing data bandwidth in a multichip system. Furthermore, the intrachip and interchip communication architectures are separately designed to maximize design flexibility. Jointly designing them could, however, improve the communication efficiency significantly and yield better solutions. Previous attempts at this include an all-photonic approach that provides a unified inter/intra-chip optical network, based on recent progress in nano-photonic technologies. Works on wireless inter-chip interconnects successfully yielded better results than their wired counterparts, but their scopes were limited to establishing a single wireless connection between two chips rather than a communication architecture for a system as a whole. In this thesis, the design of a seamless hybrid wired and wireless interconnection network for multichip systems in a package is proposed. The design utilizes on-chip wireless transceivers with dimensions spanning up to tens of centimeters. It manages to seamlessly bind both intrachip and interchip communication architectures and enables direct chip-to-chip communication between the internal cores. It is shown through cycle accurate simulations that the proposed design increases the bandwidth and reduces the energy consumption when compared to the state-of-the-art wireline I/O based multichip communications

A Scalable & Energy Efficient Graphene-Based Interconnection Framework for Intra and Inter-Chip Wireless Communication in Terahertz Band

Network-on-Chips (NoCs) have emerged as a communication infrastructure for the multi-core System-on-Chips (SoCs). Despite its advantages, due to the multi-hop communication over the metal interconnects, traditional Mesh based NoC architectures are not scalable in terms of performance and energy consumption. Folded architectures such as Torus and Folded Torus were proposed to improve the performance of NoCs while retaining the regular tile-based structure for ease of manufacturing. Ultra-low-latency and low-power express channels between communicating cores have also been proposed to improve the performance of conventional NoCs. However, the performance gain of these approaches is limited due to metal/dielectric based interconnection. Many emerging interconnect technologies such as 3D integration, photonic, Radio Frequency (RF), and wireless interconnects have been envisioned to alleviate the issues of a metal/dielectric interconnect system. However, photonic and RF interconnects need the additional physically overlaid optical waveguides or micro-strip transmission lines to enable data transmission across the NoC. Several on-chip antennas have shown to improve energy efficiency and bandwidth of on-chip data communications. However, the date rates of the mm-wave wireless channels are limited by the state-of-the-art power-efficient transceiver design. Recent research has brought to light novel graphene based antennas operating at THz frequencies. Due to the higher operating frequencies compared to mm-wave transceivers, the data rate that can be supported by these antennas are significantly higher. Higher operating frequencies imply that graphene based antennas are just hundred micrometers in size compared to dimensions in the range of a millimeter of mm-wave antennas. Such reduced dimensions are suitable for integration of several such transceivers in a single NoC for relatively low overheads. In this work, to exploit the benefits of a regular NoC structure in conjunction with emerging Graphene-based wireless interconnect. We propose a toroidal folding based NoC architecture. The novelty of this folding based approach is that we are using low power, high bandwidth, single hop direct point to point wireless links instead of multihop communication that happens through metallic wires. We also propose a novel phased based communication protocol through which multiple wireless links can be made active at a time without having any interference among the transceiver. This offers huge gain in terms of performance as compared to token based mechanism where only a single wireless link can be made active at a time. We also propose to extend Graphene-based wireless links to enable energy-efficient, phase-based chip-to-chip communication to create a seamless, wireless interconnection fabric for multichip systems as well. Through cycle-accurate system-level simulations, we demonstrate that such designs with torus like folding based on THz links instead of global wires along with the proposed phase based multichip systems. We provide estimates that they are able to provide significant gains (about 3 to 4 times better in terms of achievable bandwidth, packet latency and average packet energy when compared to wired system) in performance and energy efficiency in data transfer in a NoC as well as multichip system. Thus, realization of these kind of interconnection framework that could support high data rate links in Tera-bits-per-second that will alleviate the capacity limitations of current interconnection framework