Advanced Interconnection Technologies and System-Level Communications Functions

Active devices for digital electronic systems can be rather easily defined, both in terms of their physical performance and in terms of their functions within a digital logic circuit. In particular, the very localized view seen through a microscope is a suitable boundary for optimization of the structure of an active device, whose behavior depends largely on its microscopic local environment. System communications presents a dramatically different problem, since the physical interconnections through which components interact are the basis for the global behavior and performance of the overall system. The rapidly advancing VLSI technologies have addressed the problem of higher level interconnections by the simple expedient of mapping many such interconnections onto the benign and readily optimized VLSI monolithic circuit. However, there remain many levels of system interconnection that can not be enhanced in this way and which are increasingly seen as fundamental bottlenecks to higher performance systems.