Energy-efficient and robust 3D NoCs with contactless vertical links (Invited paper)

Abstract

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3D integration, a breakthrough technology to achieve Moore and More Than Moore, provides numerous benefits such as better performance, lower power consumption, and wide bandwidth by vertical interconnects and 3D stacking. These vertical interconnects enable design of high performance 3D Network-on-Chip (NoC) as a communication backbone for massive manycore platforms. However, existing 3D NoCs are still bottlenecked due to simple extension of 2D architectures without fully exploiting the advantages of the 3D integration. Moreover, the anticipated performance gain of 3D NoC-enabled manycore chips will be compromised due to potential failures of through silicon vias (TSVs) that are predominantly used as vertical interconnects. To address these problems, we explore a holistic design methodology starting from the physical layer to the overall interconnection architecture where the vertical data exchange takes place through contactless links using near field inductive coupling (NFIC).