Novel Chip Stacking Methods to Extend Both Horizontally and Vertically for Many-Core Architectures with ThrouChip Interface

Abstract

SUMMARYThe increase of recent non-recurrent engineering cost (design, mask and test cost) have made large System-on-Chip (SoC) difficult to develop especially with advanced technology. We radically explore an approach for cheap and flexible chip stacking by using Inductive coupling ThruChip Interface (TCI). In order to connect a large number of small chips for building a large scale system, novel chip stacking methods called the linear stacking and staggered stacking are proposed. They enable the system to be extended to x or/and y dimensions, not only to z dimension. Here, a novel chip staking layout, and its deadlock-free routing design for the case using single-core chips and multi-core chips are shown. The network with 256 nodes formed by the proposed stacking improves the latency of 2D mesh by 13.8% and the performance of NAS Parallel Benchmarks by 5.4% on average compared to that of 2D mesh. key words: inductive coupling interconnect, interconnection network, network on chip