Industry Expert Blogs

The next International Interconnect Technology Conference (IITC 2012) will be held in San Jose in a couple of weeks (June 4-6). This is a good opportunity to recall that, in some sense, the reason for scaling silicon down has changed in recent years from packing more transistors in a square (or cubic) millimeter to increasing functionality and performance at reduced power. An ever higher fraction of the power dissipation resides in the interconnect – both in the net switching itself as well as in the ever-increasing number of repeaters required to re-power more and more “long” nets.