Review of CMOS Integrated Circuit Technologies for High-Speed Photo-Detection.

The bandwidth requirement of wireline communications has increased exponentially because of the ever-increasing demand for data centers and high-performance computing systems. However, it becomes difficult to satisfy the requirement with legacy electrical links which suffer from frequency-dependent losses due to skin effects, dielectric losses, channel reflections, and crosstalk, resulting in a severe bandwidth limitation. In order to overcome this challenge, it is necessary to introduce optical communication technology, which has been mainly used for long-reach communications, such as long-haul networks and metropolitan area networks, to the medium- and short-reach communication systems. However, there still remain important issues to be resolved to facilitate the adoption of the optical technologies. The most critical challenges are the energy efficiency and the cost competitiveness as compared to the legacy copper-based electrical communications. One possible solution is silicon photonics which has long been investigated by a number of research groups. Despite inherent incompatibility of silicon with the photonic world, silicon photonics is promising and is the only solution that can leverage the mature complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies. Silicon photonics can be utilized in not only wireline communications but also countless sensor applications. This paper introduces a brief review of silicon photonics first and subsequently describes the history, overview, and categorization of the CMOS IC technology for high-speed photo-detection without enumerating the complex circuital expressions and terminologies.

A crossbar resistance switching memory readout scheme with sneak current cancellation based on a two-port current-mode sensing.

This paper describes a novel readout scheme that enables the complete cancellation of sneak currents in resistive switching random-access memory (RRAM) crossbar array. The current-mode readout is employed in the proposed readout, and a few critical advantages of the current-mode readout for crossbar RRAM are elucidated in this paper. The proposed scheme is based on a floating readout scheme for low power consumption, and one more sensing port is introduced using an additional reference word line. From the additional port, information on the sneak current amount is collected, and simple current-mode arithmetic operations are implemented to cancel out the sneak current from the sensing current. In addition, a simple method of handling the overestimated-sneak-current issue is described. The proposed scheme is verified using HSPICE simulation. Moreover, an example of a current-mode sense amplifier realizing the proposed cancelling technique is presented. The proposed sense amplifier can be implemented with less hardware overhead compared to the previous works.

Today's computing challenges: opportunities for computer hardware design.

Due to the explosive increase of digital data creation, demand on advancement of computing capability is ever increasing. However, the legacy approaches that we have used for continuous improvement of three elements of computer (process, memory, and interconnect) have started facing their limits, and therefore are not as effective as they used to be and are also expected to reach the end in the near future. Evidently, it is a large challenge for computer hardware industry. However, at the same time it also provides great opportunities for the hardware design industry to develop novel technologies and to take leadership away from incumbents. This paper reviews the technical challenges that today's computing systems are facing and introduces potential directions for continuous advancement of computing capability, and discusses where computer hardware designers find good opportunities to contribute.