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8th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED'07)
Mitigating Thermal Effects on Clock Skew with Dynamically Adaptive Drivers
San Jose, California
March 26-March 28
ISBN: 0-7695-2795-7
Mosin Mondal, Rice University
Andrew Ricketts, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Sami Kirolos, Rice University
Tamer Ragheb, Rice University
Greg Link, York College of Pennsylvania
Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Pennsylvania State University
Yehia Massoud, Rice University
On-chip temperature gradient emerged as a major design concern for high performance integrated circuits for the current and future technology nodes. Clock skew is an undesirable phenomenon for synchronous digital circuits that is exacerbated by the temperature difference between various parts of the clock tree. We investigate the effect of on-chip temperature gradient on the clock skew for a number of temperature profiles. As an effective way of mitigating the clock skew, we present an adaptive circuit technique that senses the temperature of different parts of the clock tree and adjusts the driving strengths of the corresponding clock buffers dynamically to reduce the clock skew. Simulation results demonstrate that with minimal area overhead our adaptive technique is capable of reducing the skew by 72.4%, on the average, leading to much improved clock synchronization and design performance.
Citation:
Mosin Mondal, Andrew Ricketts, Sami Kirolos, Tamer Ragheb, Greg Link, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Yehia Massoud, "Mitigating Thermal Effects on Clock Skew with Dynamically Adaptive Drivers," isqed, pp.67-72, 8th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED'07), 2007
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