Let's get something straight. It's the silicon that does all the work. It's the silicon where the information is processed and stored, and the signals generated. Packaging and interconnects increase the product's size, weight, cost and time-to-market, while decreasing the signal quality. That's it. What a happy thought! Interconnect engineers can't increase system performance; at most, we try to minimize the hit. This fact is never more apparent than in high-speed serial links, where the bandwidth of signals is ever increasing and the interconnect lengths extend across the entire board, even into large backplanes. We are pushing up against practical limits of data rates that can be transmitted over conventional copper interconnects.
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