Energy efficient sub-terahertz electrical interconnect
Name
1252061479-MIT.pdf
Size
64.22 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
414cdfd45fb625f5ac43fd2830e5643b
Author(s)
Holloway, Jack Wade,1980-
Advisor(s)
Ruonan.
Date Issued
2021
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
With the end of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling in silicon platforms, coupled with the increase in computational demand across applications, the semiconductor industry has seen a move towards high-density compute leveraging multiple dies in package. These types of products have been partially enabled by short-reach, energy-efficient, high-speed interconnect in package. Big data and AI/ML applications have pushed the development of longer-reach, high-capacity, and energy efficient interconnect enabling connectivity between racks across large data centers. This work investigates and demonstrates a new interconnect technology that fills a meter-class interconnect gap in these applications. By leveraging the wide transmission bandwidth and low-losses associated with dielectric waveguides in the sub-THz regime (100 GHz - 1 THz), large baseband data rates are aggregated across multiple channels, multiplexed on to a single electrical channel, efficiently coupled into a dielectric waveguide, and transmitted between chips. In this work, enabling component technologies are developed and demonstrated, including planar broadband couplers and high-performance sub-THz multiplexers operating in the 220-330 GHz WR-3.4 band -- both technologies designed to ease implementation and packaging costs. Lastly, an end-to-end link is realized in a 130nm Silicon Germanium BiCMOS process and is demonstrated utilizing a small cross-section polymer dielectric waveguide. The link achieves 105 Gbps in a 250 ̄ 400 [mu]m² waveguide cross section, demonstrating a state of the art 330 Gbps/mm figure of merit and better than 5 pJ/bit energy efficiency.
Description
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, September, February, 2021
Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-184).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.
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