Amin Shokrollahi of Kandou Bus SA, Lausanne/ Prof. emeritus EPFL, Lausanne

Communication of data on electrical wires between chips is fast gaining prominence in the electronics industry. Because most of the components of the transmitter and the receiver of such links are analog, rather than digital, they don't benefit as much from Moore's law. On the other hand, the need to transmit data ever faster calls for higher rates of transmission over existing electrical wires. Since in this type of communication noise is highly frequency dependent, higher transmission rates lead to much higher noise, and therefore a much faster growth of power consumption than linear. The industry has long recognized this problem as the "Interconnect bottleneck". Fundamental solutions to this important issue have remained elusive, however.

A look at the capacity of these channels reveals that today we are only transmitting at anywhere between 1% to 4% of the capacity. Therefore, at least on the surface, there is a lot to be gained by applying methods from communication theory to this problem. However, unlike many other systems such as wireless, DSL, satellite, or optical communication, the constraints on the chip-to-chip communication system are very different: transmission rates are typically 1000 times higher than those encountered in wireless communication. On the other hand, the energy allowed to be consumed for the transmission and recovery of each bit is about 1000 times less than what is customary in wireless. Also, latency requirements are extremely stringent, allowing only latencies up to very few nanoseconds. Therefore, it is not possible to use fancy processing methods.

In this talk I will introduce a new modulation scheme for chip-to-chip communication which we call chord signaling. This method is somewhat reminiscent of spatial MIMO systems, and provides a first step towards a better utilization of the available communication bandwidth between chips. Current implementations of systems based on these codes show a large reduction of total power of the communication PHY and a large increase of the communication speed compared to other classical systems.

I will also talk about internship opportunities at the Advanced R&D Lab of Kandou in the areas of signal processing/modeling, digital circuit design, and analog circuit design. Interns will have the opportunity to work on state-of-the art problems under the mentorship of internationally recognized scientists and engineers. If you are self-motivated, and looking for exciting industrial research, you may want to check out these opportunities. More information to be provided during the talk.

Biography:

Amin Shokrollahi finished his PhD at the University of Bonn in 1991. From 1991 to 1995 he was an assistant at the same university, before moving to the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley in 1995. In 1998 he joined the Bell Laboratories as a Member of the Technical Staff. In 2000 he moved to the startup company Digital Fountain as their Chief Scientist, a position he held until Digital Fountain's acquisition by Qualcomm in 2009. In 2003 he joined EPFL where he had the chairs of Algorithmic Mathematics in the Math department, and algorithmics in the Computer Science department. In 2011 he founded the company Kandou Bus which uses novel approaches from discrete mathematics, algorithm design, and electronics for the design of fast and energy efficient chip-to-chip communication links.

Amin's research interests are varied and cover coding theory, discrete mathematics, algorithm design, theoretical computer science, signal processing, networking, computational algebra, algebraic complexity theory, and most recently, electronics, areas where he has more than 200 publications, and more than 150 pending and granted patent applications. An IEEE Fellow, Amin's honors include the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award (2002), the joint IT/ComSoc Best Paper Award (2008), the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Communications Theory Award (2007), the IEEE Hamming Medal (2012), The ISSCC Jan van Vessum Award for the best European paper (2015) and the Advanced Research Grant of the European Research Council (2009).

Email:

Address:EPFL IC-DO , BC 407 (Bâtiment BC) , Lausanne, Switzerland, CH-1015