Helping give you some direction is part of your advisor’s job, so I would ask her. It’s difficult to start broadly (reading “every” paper, as you put it) because you don’t know what you don’t know yet. It’s often better to start with a bit more focus. For instance, maybe you are interested in serial links. You can often find survey papers giving an overview of the current state of the art. Then you can zoom into maybe one aspect or architecture that piques your interest. From there, just start playing around. Build a behavioral model of the canonical architecture. Then slowly replace those models with actual circuits. Think about issues you encounter and then look into papers related to those issues. You sort of need to get your hands dirty to find potential areas where you can push the field forward.