Surfliner: a distortionless electrical signaling scheme for speed of light on-chip communications

We present a novel scheme to implement distortionless transmission lines for on-chip electrical signaling. By introducing intentional leakage conductance between the wires of a differential pair, the distortionless transmission line eliminates dispersion caused by the resistive nature of on-chip wires and achieves speed of light transmission. We show that it is feasible to construct distortionless transmission line with conventional silicon process. Simulation results show that using 65nm technology, the proposed scheme can achieve 15Gbits/s bandwidth over a 20mm on-chip serial link without any equalization. This approach offers a six times improvement in delay and 85% reduction in power consumption over a conventional RC wire with repeated buffers.