Currently, and in the near future, there are no technical solutions available to overcome the issue. “In every case, the interconnects limit the overall performance of the system. “The challenge is very similar for both SoCs and 2.5/3D systems,” says Andy Heinig, group manager for advanced system packaging at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS. Selection of materials to handle manufacturing tolerances and better loss properties are now basic exercises, while new methods such as chiplets and silicon interposers are introducing new variables.”Īt a higher level, the interconnect acts as a limiter.

That requires an increasing use of equalization and the same, if not more difficult, margins to meet. “Designs strive for increased speed, lower voltage power rails and faster interfaces. “At the physical level, there will always be interesting problems as speeds increase and designs become denser,” says David Choe, senior principal product engineer for the Custom IC & PCB Group at Cadence. They span from metal 0 all the way to the between chips and chiplets. So what makes contemporary design interconnects so challenging? The answer to that question can be viewed from various levels, because interconnects literally are used at every level of a chip and for chips within a package. The complexity of interconnect is not comparable with the complexity of other blocks.” “In small systems, interconnect challenges are not something you will be concerned about. “Being ‘just a fabric’ that connects functional blocks doing the ‘real work’, interconnects are often neglected when building system architecture,” says Aleksandar Mijatovic, senior design engineer for VTool. These problems range from physical challenges, to logical and architectural challenges. Typically it results in disruption in how the tools and solutions in place are used, providing they up to the task in the first place. This limitation has shown up several times in the past, and it’s happening again today.īut when the interconnect becomes an issue, it cannot be solved in the same way issues are solved for other aspects of a chip. Interconnects are becoming much problematic as devices shrink and the amount of data being moved around a system continues to rise.

Artificial academy 2 lag