Slow Wires
For a circuit purist, “slow wire” is a blasphemy
- a wire doesn’t get slower in absolute time when shrunk
- a wire may get slower relative to a transistor when shrunk
Wire Delay Trends
- Long wires don’t scale (RC delay constant)
+ short wires do scale with transistors!
- Many “short wires” become “long wires” when shrunk
- intrinsic RC of wire relatively higher than faster gates
- New microarchitectures typically increase wire lengths
- accessing global resources cause problem