U Illinois Research Reduces Serial Link Power Consumption
Researchers from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign have designed technology that can help reduce the power
consumption of microprocessor serial links in data centers.
According to information from
Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), "serial links consume about 20
percent of microprocessor power and constitute about 7 percent of overall energy
consumption in a data center," even though they are typically idle about 50 to
70 percent of the time. "These serial links are only sporadically used, such as
when there is a request to access a Web page or a miss in the last level of
cache."
The researchers designed a 7-gigabit per second (Gbps) transceiver that uses
an on/off embedded clock architecture to significantly reduce the power
consumption of microprocessor serial links. Previous technology reported
power-on lock times of a couple of hundred nanoseconds in the case of memory
interfaces to a few microseconds in the case of Energy Efficient Ethernet, but
the transceiver technology designed by the U Illinois researchers reduced
power-on lock times to less than 20 nanoseconds. They demonstrated the
technology on 90 and 65 nanometer nodes, but according to SRC, it can also apply
to memory and networking applications.
The researchers estimate that North American data centers could save $870 a
year by using this transceiver technology.
SRC sponsored the research through the
Texas Analog Center of Excellence
(TxACE), and the team from the University of Illinois presented their research
at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference
(ISSCC) held in San Francisco, CA in February 2015.
Further information about the research can be found on the
IEEE's site.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].