TY - GEN
T1 - Graphene-based plasma wave interconnects for on-chip communication in the terahertz band
AU - Rakheja, Shaloo
AU - Li, Kexin
N1 - Funding Information:
group delay and is a nonlinear function of frequency. In Fig. 4a, the bandwidth of plasmonic and electrical interconnects is compared as a function of interconnect length for two values of the effective resistivity of copper and assuming that electrical interconnects operate in the RC regime. In general, the bandwidth of both electrical and plasmonic interconnects degrades with an increase in interconnect length; however, this degradation is much higher for electrical interconnects due to their diffusion dominated transport. A straightforward way to improve the bandwidth is to increase the width of the wire; this will result in a concomitant increase in bandwidth density (BWD = Fb/(2W)) only when the aspect ratio of the wire is fixed [7]. In Fig. 4b, we show the impact of interconnect width on BWD of plasmonic and electrical interconnects computed at a fixed location on the wire. For resistance-dominated electrical interconnects, BWD increases with an increase in width for aspect ratio chosen as 2. In the plasmonic domain, the wire width is essentially determined by the resonant frequency to avoid edge plasmon modes and leakage of the plasmonic signal into the surrounding dielectric media. Therefore, we choose the width of plasmonic waveguide as _ b!Oc, where !O is obtained from (1). As such, the ratio < is independent of width once the frequency of operation is fixed. Finally, we also compare the energy-per-bit (EPB) of electrical and plasmonic interconnects and the results are plotted in Fig. 4c. Within the shot-noise limited transmission in the plasmonic domain, the EPB is given as _ 21 .; " b BEJ GHFGc, where " denotes the average number of plasmons needed to encode one bit of information, and Lint (Lprop) is the interconnect (propagation) length. For a specified bit-error rate (BER) in signal detection, " _ ] b ^ c. In this work, we choose _ 430, which yields " `68. For electrical 1 2 interconnects, EPB is given as >C2_ JL\ HL\ K BEJ 88, where JL HL is the transmitter (receiver) capacitance, K is the per-unit-length wire capacitance, and 88 is the supply voltage. Unlike electrical interconnects for which EPB increases only linearly with interconnect length, the EPB of plasmonic interconnects shows an exponential dependence on interconnect length. As shown in Fig. 4c, plasmonic interconnects outperform their electrical counterparts in terms of EPB at short length scales up to few 10’s of micrometers when the electrostatic screening length, 'I is finite. The effect of 'I is quite significant on EPB; therefore, a graphene stack where the electrical coupling between the parallel layers is strong such that 'I is large is preferred for waveguiding applications. III. Conclusion: The paper quantifies the opportunities of graphene plasmonics for on-chip communication in the THz band. We focus on the electrical generation of plasma waves in a quasi-ballistic GaN HEMT governed by the Dyakonov-Shur instability. We show that plasmonic interconnects offer superior bandwidth, bandwidth density, and energy-per-bit when compared against electrical interconnects at scaled technology nodes. Acknowledgment: This work was supported in part by the NSF (Award # CCF-1565656) and by The Boeing Company.
Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by the NSF (Award # CCF-1565656) and by The Boeing Company.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2017/6/28
Y1 - 2017/6/28
N2 - As the communication complexity is exacerbated by dimensional scaling of on-chip components, it becomes important to investigate communication and transduction mechanisms that can deliver enhanced connectivity, while minimizing energy dissipated in communication. The communication bottleneck can be mitigated by using graphene-based plasmonic interconnects in high-performance systems. In this work, we use the phenomenon of Dyakonov-Shur (DS) instability in a quasi-ballistic GaN high-electron mobility transistor (HEMT) to electrically excite surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in graphene serving as the gate electrode of the HEMT. Information encoded in SPPs is guided along the graphene waveguide for low-energy on-chip data communication. We evaluate and compare the performance of plasmonic interconnects against electrical interconnects at scaled technology nodes.
AB - As the communication complexity is exacerbated by dimensional scaling of on-chip components, it becomes important to investigate communication and transduction mechanisms that can deliver enhanced connectivity, while minimizing energy dissipated in communication. The communication bottleneck can be mitigated by using graphene-based plasmonic interconnects in high-performance systems. In this work, we use the phenomenon of Dyakonov-Shur (DS) instability in a quasi-ballistic GaN high-electron mobility transistor (HEMT) to electrically excite surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in graphene serving as the gate electrode of the HEMT. Information encoded in SPPs is guided along the graphene waveguide for low-energy on-chip data communication. We evaluate and compare the performance of plasmonic interconnects against electrical interconnects at scaled technology nodes.
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U2 - 10.1109/E3S.2017.8246185
DO - 10.1109/E3S.2017.8246185
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85045965213
T3 - 2017 5th Berkeley Symposium on Energy Efficient Electronic Systems, E3S 2017 - Proceedings
SP - 1
EP - 3
BT - 2017 5th Berkeley Symposium on Energy Efficient Electronic Systems, E3S 2017 - Proceedings
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 5th Berkeley Symposium on Energy Efficient Electronic Systems, E3S 2017
Y2 - 19 October 2017 through 20 October 2017
ER -