Energy and area efficient near field inductive coupling: A case study on 3D NoC

Near Field Inductive Coupling (NFIC) enables design of energy efficient and robust three-dimensional (3D) manycore systems. The associated design challenges and the trade-offs of the NFIC-based vertical links depend on achievable data-rates, energy and area overheads. In this work, we propose a holistic design flow that explores optimum energy and area efficient NFIC-link design as a communication backbone in a 3D manycore chip. Moreover, the design framework employs statistical link analysis to select optimum NFIC link configuration. The proposed NFIC-link design is significantly more efficient in terms of energy efficiency and area overhead compared to state-of-the-art counterpart. Energy efficiency and resiliency of NFIC-links are exploited in the context of a 3D NoC design. We demonstrate that overall reliability of the NFIC-enabled 3D NoC is significantly better compared to a conventional stand-alone TSV-based architecture.