Jordan comments on Experiment Idea Thread - Spring 2011 - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Psychohistorian 06 May 2011 06:10PM

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Comment author: Jordan 06 May 2011 09:17:19PM 0 points [-]

Field: Electrical Engineering. No idea how practical this is though:

An important problem with increasing the number of cores on a chip is having enough bandwidth between the cores. Some people are working on in-silicone optical channels, which seems promising. Instead of this would it be possible for the different cores to communicate with each other wirelessly? This requires integrated transmitter and receivers, but I believe both exist.

Comment author: twanvl 06 May 2011 11:07:16PM 1 point [-]

I am not an electrical engineer, but as far as I know, wireless communication requires a relatively large antenna. Also, the bandwidth is likely a lot worse than that of a wire. There is a good reason that people still use wires whenever possible.

Comment author: Jordan 07 May 2011 01:36:16AM *  1 point [-]

I should have done some more due diligence before suggesting my idea:

http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~sblee/Papers/mobicom09-wnoc.pdf

Edit: I was originally concerned about bandwidth, but the above article claims

On-chip wireless channel capacity. Because of such low signal loss over on-chip wireless channels and new techniques in generating terahertz signals on-chip [14,31], the on-chip wireless network becomes feasible. In addition, it is possible to switch a CMOS transistor as fast as 500 GHz at 32 nm CMOS [21], thus allowing us to implement a large number of high frequency bands for the onchip wireless network. Following a rule of thumb in RF design, the maximum available bandwidth is 10% of the carrier frequency. For example, with a carrier frequency of 300 GHz, the data rate of each channel can be as large as 30 Gbps. Using a 32 nm CMOS process, there will be total of 16 available channels, from 100 GHz to 500 GHz, for the on-chip wireless network, and each channel can transmit at 10 to 20 Gbps. In the 1000-core CMPs design, the total aggregate data rate can be as high as 320 Gbps with 16 TX’s and 64 RX’s.

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