It's about the power: An architect's view of interconnect

Summary form only given. As integrated circuit technology scales chips are becoming power, not area limited, and the power dissipated moving bits on, off, and across chips is becoming increasingly important. This talk gives an architect's perspective on future chip interconnect. The demand for interconnect is driven by the application. Both SoCs and high-performance processors have demanding interconnect requirements. In modern chips, these requirements are met by organizing global interconnect as a network-on-chip or NoC. The regularity afforded by this organization enables layout and circuit optimizations. To reduce the energy per bit-mm, low-energy signaling with sophisticated circuits are becoming more widely used. It is important to optimize the entire interconnect system - the wire, the circuit, and the NoC together - not just each of the three in isolation.