18th International Conference on VLSI Design held jointly with 4th International Conference on Embedded Systems Design (VLSID'05)
A Low-Power Current-Mode Clock Distribution Scheme for Multi-GHz NoC-Based SoCs
Kolkata, India
January 03-January 07
ISBN: 0-7695-2264-5
Performance of System-on-Chips (SoC) is limited by rising delays and noise in buses and point-to-point interconnects. This also has a profound impact on the clock distribution network. Networks-on-Chip (NoC) provides a regular communication fabric that helps to overcome these limitations. However, NoCs too will face bottlenecks in clocking beyond a few GHz in voltage mode clock signaling. This work presents a reliable quasi-synchronous clock distribution scheme for NoCs that uses a single-ended current-mode clock signaling technique. Simulation results show the circuit to be reliable under process variations, and having an average of 11% improvement in delay and average power over other current mode schemes. Simulation results indicate acceptable performance up to 7.5GHz in 0.18µm technology.
Citation:
Ashok Narasimhan, Shantanu Divekar, Praveen Elakkumanan, Ramalingam Sridhar, "A Low-Power Current-Mode Clock Distribution Scheme for Multi-GHz NoC-Based SoCs," vlsid, pp.130-133, 18th International Conference on VLSI Design held jointly with 4th International Conference on Embedded Systems Design (VLSID'05), 2005