WINC: Wireless Networks within
Next-Generation Computing Systems

A project funded by the European Research Council (ERC)

Great news! ERC PoC granted.

We have been granted an ERC Proof of Concept project called
"EWiC: Emulation of Wireless Communication among Chiplets inside a Computing System"

We will develop a prototype emulating the process of wireless communication within an actual multi-chip processor.
We will soon provide more details. Stay tuned!

Join the project

We are looking for bright and motivated individuals to join the WINC team!
We welcome applicants from ECE, CS, Physics Engineering, or Math students with different sets of expertise from electromagnetics, analog design, signal processing, computer architecture, and quantum computing.

We accept exceptional candidates on a continued basis.
So if you are interested, feel free to send your CV and transcript anytime.

Motivation

Computing systems are ubiquitous in our daily life and have transformed the way we learn, work, or communicate with each other, to the point that progress is intimately tied to the improvements brought by new generations of the processors that lie at the heart of these systems.

A common trait of current computing systems is that their internal data communication has become a fundamental bottleneck. The anticipated death of Moore’s Law has forced computer scientists and architects to find new ways to build faster processors, which include massive parallelization, specialized accelerator design, and disruptive technologies such as quantum computing. These trends cause an exponential increase in the volume and variability of data transfers within computing systems, rendering traditional interconnects insufficient and threatening to halt progress unless fast and versatile communication alternatives are developed.

Objectives

The WINC project envisions a revolution in computer architecture enabled by the integration of wireless networks within computing systems. The main hypothesis is that wireless terahertz technology will lead to at least a tenfold improvement in the speed, efficiency, and scalability of both non-quantum and quantum systems. With a cross-cutting approach, WINC aims to validate the hypothesis by (i) revealing the fundamental limits of wireless communications within computing packages, (ii) developing antennas and protocols that operate close to those limits while complying with the stringent constraints of the scenario, and (iii) developing radically novel architectures that translate the unique benefits of the wireless vision into order-of-magnitude improvements at the system level. If successful, WINC will be the seed of a new generation of non-quantum and quantum systems and foster progress in the computing field for the decades to come.

WINC in a nutshell

Principal Investigator

Sergi Abadal is the Principal Investigator of WINC. He received the PhD in Computer Architecture from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in July 2016. Previously, he had obtained the MSc and the BSc in Telecommunication Engineering also from UPC in 2011 and 2010, respectively. He has also held several visiting researcher positions over the years, including Georgia Tech in 2009, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015/2017/2019, and the Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas in 2018. Currently, Sergi is group leader and principal investigator at the Computer Architecture Department at UPC and the coordinator of H2020 WIPLASH project. He is also Area Editor of the Nano Communication Networks (Elsevier) Journal, where he was selected Editor of the Year 2019. He also acts as one of the ambassadors the European Innovation Council (EIC) through its program of National Champions. He has published over 90 papers in top journals and conferences, and contributed in the organization of over 20 conferences and workshops. Sergi is member of the IEEE, ACM, and HiPEAC.

Website: www.sergiabadal.com
Contact: abadal@ac.upc.edu

Selected Publications
[full list here]

Electromagnetic Nanonetworks Beyond 6G: From Wearable and Implantable Networks to On-chip and Quantum Communication
This paper provides an overview of the field of electromagnetic nanonetworks, including emerging technologies and applications that include wireless communicatiosn within computing packages, both classical and quantum.
S. Abadal, C. Han, V. Petrov, L. Galluccio, I. F. Akyildiz, J. M. Jornet
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 42 , no. 8, 2024.
[Paper]

Graphene-based Wireless Agile Interconnects for Massive Heterogeneous Multi-chip Processors
This position paper provides an overview of the vision of the WINC project and the challenges that could be found along the way from the electronics, electromagnetics, and computer architecture perspectives.
S. Abadal, R. Guirado, H. Taghvaee, A. Jain, E. Pereira de Santana, P. Haring Bolívar, M. Saeed, R. Negra, Z. Wang, K-T. Wang, M. C. Lemme, J. Klein, M. Zapater, A. Levisse, D. Atienza, D. Rossi, F. Conti, M. Dazzi, G. Karunaratne, I. Boybat and A. Sebastian
IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 162-169, 2023.
[Paper]