The future of wires

Concern about the performance of wires in scaled technologies has led to research exploring other communication methods. This paper examines wire and gate delays as technologies migrate from 0.18-mum to 0.035-mum feature sizes to better understand the magnitude of the wiring problem. Wires that shorten in length as technologies scale have delays that either track gate delays or grow slowly relative to gate delays. This result is good news since these "local" wires dominate chip wiring. Despite this scaling of local wire performance, computer-aided design (CAD) tools must still become more sophisticated in dealing with these wires. Under scaling, the total number of wires grows exponentially, so CAD tools will need to handle an ever-growing percentage of all the wires in order to keep designer workloads constant. Global wires present a more serious problem to designers. These are wires that do not scale in length since they communicate signals across the chip. The delay of these wires will remain constant if repeaters are used, meaning that relative to gate delays, their delays scale upwards. These increased delays for global communication will drive architectures toward modular designs with explicit global latency mechanisms.