Neksus: An Interconnect for Heterogeneous System-In-Package Architectures

Abstract

In the embedded systems industry today, skyrocketing design and manufacturing costs of Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) are key limiting factors for growth. Emerging 2.5D-based System-In-Package (SiP) architectures show potential to lower these costs by enabling the reuse of hard core units and providing higher manufacturing yields due to small chiplet sizes.In this paper, we present Neksus, a novel architecture designed to lower SiP manufacturing costs, support modular "plug-and-play" chiplet integration, and leverage the unique properties of interposers. Key to Neksus is a new dedicated interconnect chiplet that addresses the limitations of SiP packaging technology by leveraging direct communication over a mini-chain IP-connection topology. In addition to satisfying SiP technology constraints, because our mini-chain design provides high-bandwidth IP-to-IP communication, it is particularly well-suited for bandwidth-intensive mobile applications. Our evaluation shows Neksus provides up to 28% performance improvement and 31% energy savings over recent SiP architecture.