Demystifying SWCNT-bundle-interconnects inductive behavior through novel modeling
Journal of Computational Electronics
METEOR: Hybrid photonic ring-mesh network-on-chip for multicore architectures
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) - Special Issue on Design Challenges for Many-Core Processors, Special Section on ESTIMedia'13 and Regular Papers
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Although carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been widely proposed as interconnect fabrics for future ultra deep submicron (UDSM) technologies, there is a lack of system-level performance analysis using these interconnects. In this paper, we investigate the performance of four CNT alternatives that may replace conventional copper (Cu) interconnects at the global interconnect level – (i) single walled CNTs (SWCNTs), (ii) SWCNT bundles, (iii) multi-walled CNTs (MWCNTs) and (iv) bundles of mixed SWCNTs/MWCNTs. Detailed RLC equivalent circuit models for conventional CNT interconnects are described and used to calculate propagation delays. These models are then incorporated into a system-level environment to estimate the impact of using CNT global interconnects on the overall performance of several multi-core chip multiprocessor (CMP) applications. Our results indicate that MWCNTs can provide the most significant performance speedup among the CNT alternatives (up to 1.9×) over Cu global interconnects. With further improvements in CNT fabrication technology, it is shown that mixed SWCNT/MWCNT bundles and SWCNT bundles can also become viable global interconnect alternatives.