INTERCONNECT BOTTLENECK
LAMBERT M. SURHONE, MARIAM T. TENNOE, SUSAN F. HENSSONOW
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The interconnect bottleneck, the point at which integrated circuits (ICs) reach their capacity, is expected sometime around 2010.
Improved performance of computer systems has been achieved, in large part, by downscaling the IC minimum feature size.
This allows the basic IC building block, the transistor, to operate at a higher frequency, performing more computations per second.
However, downscaling of the minimum feature size also results in tighter packing of the wires on a microprocessor, which increases parasitic capacitance and signal propagation delay.
Consequently, the delay due to the communication between the parts of a chip becomes comparable to the computation delay itself.
This phenomenon, known as an "interconnect bottleneck," is becoming a major problem in high-performance computer systems.
