Energy efficient current-mode signaling scheme

This paper describes a novel energy-efficient current-mode signaling scheme (CMS scheme) for long on-chip interconnects. The scheme was fabricated in 180 nm process. Measurement results show that the proposed 6 mm long link offers 22% improvement in delay with 81% lower energy consumption at 0.62 Gbps over the voltage-mode scheme. The proposed scheme offers 20% improvement in power-delay-product over the CMS scheme proposed by Katoch et al. in [5]. Furthermore, it is less sensitive to intra-die variations.