Transmission lines on integrated circuits for high speed communication

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Publication Type thesis
School or College College of Engineering
Department Electrical & Computer Engineering
Author Lee, William Scott
Title Transmission lines on integrated circuits for high speed communication
Date 2008-08-25
Description As microelectronics continue to scale, the transistor delay decreases while the wire delay remains relatively constant or even increases. The wire or interconnect delay is quickly becoming the key performance limiting factor in integrated circuit design. This thesis is designed to determine the feasibility of replacing conventional diffusive wires with transmission lines and to compare the tradeoffs of the two systems. The transmission lines propagate signals at the speed of light in the medium and are much less dependent on repeaters than comparable diffusive wires. Therefore, the transmission line system has potentially large power and performance benefits. To compare the tradeoffs, five important design metrics are used: propagation delay, power consumption, maximum throughput, area requirements, and noise tolerance. The transmission lines prove to be an excellent replacement for diffusive wires especially as the length passes 500 /im. For a 1 cm interconnect, the transmission line shows more than a 90% improvement in delay and more than an 80% improvement in energy per bit transmitted. In practice, fabricating transmission lines on real integrated circuits is a difficult process because they require precise resistance, inductance, and capacitance parameter extraction. Using tools specially developed by Mentor Graphics for this thesis, the necessary wire dimensions to produce various transmission lines are calculated for in IBM's 65 nm process.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Electric power transmission; Microelectronics; Integrated circuits
Dissertation Institution University of Utah
Dissertation Name MS
Language eng
Relation is Version of Digital reproduction of "Transmission lines on integrated circuits for high speed communication" J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections TK7.5 2008 .L44
Rights Management ©William Scott Lee
Format Extent 25,465,135 bytes
Identifier us-etd2,110605
Source Original: University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections
Conversion Specifications Original scanned on Epson GT-30000 as 400 dpi to pdf using ABBYY FineReader9.0 Professional Edition
ARK ark:/87278/s6ww7zb8
Setname ir_etd
ID 193887
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6ww7zb8