Kandou Announces Availability of Glasswing(TM) USR SerDes IP

Glasswing(TM) Eliminates Interposers for Die-to-Die Interconnect in a Shared MCM Package

LAUSANNE, Switzerland, May 23, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kandou Bus S.A., the global pioneer in multi-wire SerDes technology, today announced the introduction of the Glasswing(TM) USR SerDes, enabling the assembly of multiple chiplets inside a shared package without the need for costly silicon interposers.  While advanced CMOS processes continue to provide a path for integration, there has been an increasing rise in costs associated with yield loss and with the design of large devices.  Customers in networking, hyperscale datacenters, AI/machine learning and high-performance computing are now seeing the value of using the Glasswing USR SerDes to disaggregate large SoCs into smaller, more manageable pieces and pushing only necessary blocks into advanced processes.   

"Glasswing is the first Chord signaling-based SerDes that is optimized to support chiplet applications," said Amin Shokrollahi, Founder and CEO of Kandou.  "Our vision is an interoperable ecosystem of chiplet solutions enabled by Glasswing.  The announcement today is the first of many as we proliferate Glasswing to different foundries, metal stacks and process nodes while preserving the ability for all Glasswing IPs to communicate with each other."  

The first customer products that implement Glasswing are expected to ship later in 2018.

Glasswing and Chord(TM) Signaling

Glasswing is based on Kandou's Chord(TM) signaling architecture which is a generalization of differential signaling.  While differential signaling delivers one bit on two correlated wires, Chord signaling delivers n bits on n+1 correlated wires.  The combination of the signaling on the wires and the comparators that are used to identify the bits are together called a "chordal chord".

Glasswing's fundamental chordal code is CNRZ-5 which sends five bits on six correlated wires:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/48418c71-6658-48e1- ...

Bits are introduced at different voltage levels on the wires using a carefully chosen codebook and the comparator network is uniquely designed to extract the bits and deliver NRZ-shaped binary eyes.  The resulting binary eyes are much larger than the eyes realized with PAM-4, and the code is inherently more tolerant to Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) and reflections, a form of ISI that is especially important in USR applications.  Larger eyes require less equalization, hence less power. Glasswing, for example, only uses a simple linear equalizer at the receiver.