An automatic direction control scheme for bi-directional bus repeaters with dynamic collaborative driving

This paper describes a newly developed automatic direction-control-scheme for bi-directional bus repeaters with dynamic-collaborative-driving. Repeater directions are rapidly determined by detecting the direction of enable signal propagation through an additional enable signal line, which is driven by dynamic collaborative-drivers. Application to an on-chip peripheral bus reduced control circuits to half and a dynamically reconfigurable processor (DRP, a kind of innovative reconfigurable logic LSI) application could reduce configuration context data and transistor count to 25%. Experimental results from a 0.18-μm CMOS implementation indicate that the proposed scheme improves signal propagation time four times faster than a conventional 3-state bus driver scheme.