Enhancing signal integrity through a low-overhead encoding scheme on address buses

Signal integrity is and will continue to be a major concern in deep sub-micron VLSI designs where the proximity of signal carrying lines leads to crosstalk, unpredictable signal delays and other parasitic side effects. Our scheme uses bus encoding that guarantees that at any time any two signal carrying lines will be separated by at least one grounded line and thus providing a high degree of signal integrity. This comes at a small overhead of only one additional bus line (the closest related work needs 14 additional lines for a 32-bit bus) and a small average performance decrease of 0.36%. By means of a large set of real-world applications, we compare our scheme to other state-of-the-art approaches and present comparisons in terms of degree of integrity, overhead (e.g. additional lines required) and a possible performance decrease.