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IEEE International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR)

A 40GHz clock 160Gb/s 4x4 switch circuit using single flux quantum technology for high-speed packet switching systems

Shinichi Yorozu, Y. Hashimoto, Y. Kameda, Hirotaka Terai, Akira Fujimaki, Nobuyuki Yoshikawa

Published Jun 10, 2004• 9 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Large-scale telecommunication systems in nationwide networks will require routers having a packet switching throughput capacity of over several-tens of Tb/s. In such future high-end routers, packet switches will need higher processing speeds than semiconductor devices can provide. We have demonstrated a 40 GHz clock, 0.8 mW, 160 Gb/s, 4/spl times/4 switch circuit that uses single flux quantum (SFQ) technology. The main components of an SFQ circuit are Josephson junctions and a superconducting loop. In designing the circuit, we have developed two key technologies: an automatic cell placement and route tool to increase designable circuit scale; a passive interconnection to decrease latency. These technologies will enable implementing Tb/s-scale switches and switch schedulers for high-speed packet switching systems.

DOI
10.1109/hpsr.2004.1303415

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Large-scale telecommunication systems in nationwide networks will require routers having a packet switching throughput capacity of over several-tens of Tb/s. In such future high-end routers, packet switches will need higher processing speeds than semiconductor devices can provide. We have demonstrated a 40 GHz clock, 0.8 mW, 160 Gb/s, 4/spl times/4 switch circuit that uses single flux quantum (SFQ) technology. The main components of an SFQ circuit are Josephson junctions and a superconducting loop. In designing the circuit, we have developed two key technologies: an automatic cell placement and route tool to increase designable circuit scale; a passive interconnection to decrease latency. These technologies will enable implementing Tb/s-scale switches and switch schedulers for high-speed packet switching systems.
We have been developing a single-flux-quantum (SFQ) cross-bar switch, which is a main component of a network packet switch. We think that a network switch is an application in which the high speed of SFQ technology would be advantageous. Anticipating general and large-scale SFQ logic circuit design, we used the cell-based design method and the CONNECT standard SFQ cell library. The two-input and two-output cross-bar switch, a core switch component, consists of 13 logic cells connected by Josephson-transmission-line (JTL) cells. Because of the large size of JTL cells and the large delay in them, timing adjustment becomes more difficult as the operating speed and circuit size increase. After using a commercially available automatic router to find appropriate routes efficiently, we used a static timing analyzer for fine timing adjustment. Timing violations were fixed by changing JTL path delays using the tools we developed. The target operating frequency of the switch was 40 GHz, which corresponds to a clock period of 25 ps. Careful timing adjustment was necessary to ensure correct operations at such a high speed. The test chip was fabricated by using an NEC standard Nb process. The circuit, including on-chip test circuitry, was composed of about 1500 Josephson junctions. We confirmed its correct operations up to 50 GHz with a bias margin of /spl plusmn/20%.
With regard to sustaining future capacity of network traffic, the current hardware technology has a big bottleneck in terms of power consumption and insufficient operation speed. To overcome this bottleneck, we have developed a single flux quantum (SFQ) packet-switching circuit. We report recent progress in developing the SFQ packet-switching application. First, we demonstrate a 40 GHz, 160 Gb/s, 4 /spl times/ 4 packet switching circuit, which is currently the fastest clock frequency reported packet switch. Then, we describe a currently possible switching module using SFQ technology. Finally, we consider how SFQ technology can be used to scale the packet-switching capacity up to 100 Tbps.
Large-scale telecommunication systems in the larger nationwide network of the next decade will require routers having a packet switching throughput capacity of over several-tens Tbps. In such future high-end routers, the packet switch, which is the biggest bottleneck of the router, will need higher processing speeds than semiconductor devices. In this paper, we describe an SFQ packet switch architecture that is used in the internal speed-up Banyan network. According to the architecture we have designed and demonstrated a deep-pipelined 2/spl times/2 packet switch logic circuit, which is the key element in a packet switch, by applying two technological advances regarding design methodology and packaging. This circuit is among the largest SFQ random logic circuits yet reported.
We are developing a single-flux-quantum (SFQ) packet switch for over 1-Tb/s switching systems. Investigation of several switch topologies leads us to select the Batcher-Banyan packet switch because of its simplicity and regularity. The packet switch structure we propose consists of simple 2/spl times/2 unit switches each connected by speeded-up internal links. Numeric simulation showed that the speeded-up links greatly improved the throughput by resolving packet blocking, which is a major drawback of the Banyan switch. High throughput compatible to a crossbar switch was attained by using links whose speed was quadrupled. Moreover, the throughput did not decrease even though the number of input/output ports increased. Taking the speed of SFQ basic gates into account, the cycle time of the 2/spl times/2 unit switch reaches 25 ps, which is sufficient to achieve the 40-GHz operation. If unit switches are connected by quadrupled internal links, the Batcher-Banyan switch can accept the 10-Gb/s external input rate per channel. This indicates that the total throughput of a 128/spl times/128 switch exceeds 1 Tb/s. The unit switch was designed down to the SFQ gate level. To design a large SFQ circuit, we built several "standard" SFQ cells whose shape was square or rectangular with a unit width and height. Such shapes make it easier to place and connect a number of cells. We show some experimental results of testing SFQ standard cells and logic circuits.
A superconducting front-end receiver operating in a wide frequency band from 10 to 40 Gb/s could increase the throughput of packet switches. Rapid Single Flux Quantum logic, which has the advantage of high-speed operation at medium integration levels, was used to build receiver components: a multiple bit-rate clock recovery circuit and a demultiplexer. Only 16 heading bits of the packet were required to read the clock frequency in a range from 22.5 to 45 Gb/s. Preliminary experiments showed single bit-rate clock recovery cell operation up to 35 GHz and /spl plusmn/17% bias current margins for a 1:2 demultiplexer. The interface between the receiver and semiconductor components is discussed.
Single-flux quantum logic (SFQ) circuits, in which a flux quantum is used as an information carrier, have the possibility for opening the door to a new digital system operated at over 100-GHz clock frequency at extremely low power dissipation. The SFQ logic system is a so-called pulse logic, which is completely different from the level logic for semiconductors like CMOS, so circuit design technologies for SFQ logic circuits have to be newly developed. Recently, much progress in basic technologies for designing SFQ circuits and operating circuits at high speeds has been made. With advances in these design tools, large-scale circuits including more than several thousand junctions can be easily operated with the clock frequency of more than several tens of gigahertz. High-end routers and high-end computers are possible applications of SFQ logic circuits because of their high throughput nature and the low power dissipation of SFQ logic. In this paper, recent advances of SFQ circuit design technologies and recent developments of switches for high-end routers and microprocessors for high-end computers that are considered possible applications for SFQ logic will be described.