What does this equation mean?

Here is the physical core. To first order, a short parallel die-to-die link is a driven capacitive wire, and the energy spent per bit is set by the capacitance that must be charged and discharged: $E_b \;\approx\; \tfrac{1}{2}\left(C_{\mathrm{fix}} + c_w \ell\right) V_{\mathrm{sw}}^{2}$. where $C_{\mathrm{fix}}$ collects driver, receiver, bump and pad capacitance, $c_w$ is capacitance per unit length of the conductor, $\ell$ is the reach, and $V_{\mathrm{sw}}$ is the signalling swing. Two assumptions are doing the work and both deserve stating. First, this treats the link as a lumped capacitance rather than a transmission line — reasonable for a few millimetres of on-package wire at moderate rates, wrong once the link is long or fast enough to need equalisation, retiming and serialisation, at which point the fixed circuit overhead dominates and the linear term stops being the whole story. Second, it ignores clocking and idle power, which for real links are not negligible.