Preparing 25Gbps electrical I/O for exascale computing systems

This paper summarizes the exploratory work conducted at IBM Research and Zeon Corporation, which seeks to expand bandwidth and reduce power consumption of electrical I/O's for future exascale computing systems. The development of novel low-loss dielectric materials was coupled with highspeed and power scalable circuit designs to achieve 25Gbps per channel data-rate and to investigate power limits as low as 1pJ/bit at 10Gbps for aggregated parallel links. Results from test vehicles confirmed over 20% reduction in channel loss at 20GHz when compared to currently leading commercial materials, which will permit the extension of electrical link performance to meet future system requirements.