VLSI Design
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 95402, 12 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2007/95402
Variation-Tolerant and Low-Power Source-Synchronous Multicycle On-Chip Interconnect Scheme
1VLSI Design Group, NVIDIA Corporation, Santa Clara 95050, CA, USA
2Electrical Enginering and Computer Science Department (EECS), Northwestern University, Evanston, 60208-3118, IL, USA
3Circuit Research Laboratories, Intel Corporation, Hillsboro 97124, OR, USA
Received 6 November 2006; Revised 27 February 2007; Accepted 16 March 2007
Academic Editor: Davide Bertozzi
Copyright © 2007 Maged Ghoneima et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
A variation-tolerant low-power source-synchronous multicycle (SSMC ) interconnect
scheme is proposed. This scheme is scalable and suitable for transferring data across
different clock domains such as those in “many-core” SoCs and in
3D-ICs. SSMC replaces intermediate flip-flops by a source-synchronous synchronization
scheme. Removing the intermediate flip-flops in the SSMC scheme enables better averaging
of delay variations across the whole interconnect, which reduces bit-rate degradation due to
within-die WID process variations. Monte Carlo circuit simulations show that SSMC eliminates