SPIRAL: Signal-Power Integrity Co-Analysis for High-Speed Inter-Chiplet Serial Links Validation

By Xiao Dong¹, Songyu Sun¹, Yangfan Jiang¹, Jingtong Hu², Dawei Gao^1,3, Cheng Zhuo^1,4
1Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
²University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA
³Zhejiang ICsprout Semiconductor Co., Ltd., Hangzhou, China
⁴Key Laboratory of Collaborative Sensing and Autonomous Unmanned Systems of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou, China

Chiplet has recently emerged as a promising solution to achieving further performance improvements by breaking down complex processors into modular components and communicating through high-speed inter-chiplet serial links. However, the ever-growing on-package routing density and data rates of such serial links inevitably lead to more complex and worse signal and power integrity issues than a large monolithic chip. This highly demands efficient analysis and validation tools to support robust design. In this paper, a signal-power integrity co-analysis framework for high-speed inter-chiplet serial links validation named SPIRAL is proposed. The framework first builds equivalent models for the links with a machine learning-based transmitter model and an impulse response based model for the channel and receiver. Then, the signal-power integrity is co-analyzed with a pulse response based method using the equivalent models. Experimental results show that SPIRAL yields eye diagrams with 0.82--1.85% mean relative error, while achieving 18--44× speedup compared to a commercial SPICE.

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