Application of credit-based flow control to RSFQ micropipelines

Traditional micropipelines based on handshaking mechanisms are simple and reliable, but their throughput is limited by the round-trip flight time between two consecutive micropipeline stages. We propose an RSFQ implementation of a micropipeline with simple credit-based flow control that can hide the round-trip latency and significantly improve the throughput. In this paper, we present numerically calculated and experimentally measured throughput for several types of RSFQ credit-controlled micropipelines (including the special case of a micropipeline with only one credit), and their critical comparison.