Error-correction and crosstalk avoidance in DSM busses

Aggressive process scaling and increasing clock rates have made crosstalk noise an important issue in VLSI design. Switching on long, adjacent bus wires can lead to timing violations and logic faults. At the same time, system-level interconnects have also become more susceptible to other less predictable forms of interference such as noise induced by power grid fluctuations, electromagnetic interference, and alpha-particle radiation. Previous work has treated these systematic and nonsystematic forms of noise separately. We propose to make system-level interconnects more robust using encoding that simultaneously addresses error-correction requirements and crosstalk noise avoidance. This is more efficient than satisfying these requirements separately. We give algorithms for obtaining optimal encodings and present a practical class of codes called boundary-shift codes. We evaluate the overhead of our method, and make comparisons to using error-correction with simple shielding.