Introduction

Abstract

The continuous development of semiconductor technology over the last five decades has been the enabling factor that has driven many huge changes in our everyday life. Personal computing, mobile communications, Internet, broadband technology and automobile industry, are obvious examples. This remarkable development is the result of technology scaling that led to fabrication of Integrated Circuit (IC) with smaller feature sizes, higher levels of integration and faster operating frequencies. The process of device scaling evolved from few micrometers to nanometers today, and the circuit complexity has advanced from Small-Scale Integration (SSI) in 1960s to Giga-Scale Integration (GSI) in 2000s. It is predicted that this integration continues at a faster speed towards a trillion transistors per chip, Tera-Scale Integration (TSI) era, in 2020s. Today, not only digital devices and memories, but also analog/mixed-signal blocks, MEMS based sensors, and other functional blocks are being integrated on the same die to build a complete system. However, the benefits of system integration are significantly reduced without efficient communication between these blocks. Thus, this book addresses the problems of global on-chip interconnects using novel circuit level techniques.