Wireless Network-on-Chip analysis of propagation technique for on-chip communication

Abstract

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a communication paradigm capable of facilitating a scalable interconnection infrastructure for multi core processors. Wireless NoCs have been introduced to improve the communication performance over long-distance processing nodes. Current on-chip antennas used in wireless NoCs communicate predominantly through surface waves, where the efficacy of the wireless nodes is partially determined by the radiation efficiency and transmission gain limited due to the conductivity loss of the silicon substrate. Recently, an on-chip propagation technique of radio waves was introduced, through the un-doped silicon layer as opposed to surface-waves prevalent in literature. The through-substrate propagation waves provide a unique solution to overcome the challenge of long-distance communication between processing nodes. In this work, overall improvements are shown compared to traditional wireless NoCs with the placement of antennas on undoped silicon (i.e. communicating through surface waves), simulated in NoC architectures across performance metrics of area, power consumption and latency.