Transition Skew Coding: A Power and Area Efficient Encoding Technique for Global On-Chip Interconnects

Global signaling is becoming more and more challenging as technology scales down toward the deep submicron. We propose a new bus encoding technique, transition skew coding, that targets many of the global interconnects challenges such as crosstalk, peak energy and current, switching and leakage power, repeaters area, wiring area, signal integrity and noise. Simulations are done on different bus lengths using a 90nm library. Repeaters sizing and spacing are optimized, and the proposed encoded bus is compared against a standard bus and a bus with shields inserted between every two wires. The encoding and decoding latencies are also analyzed. Simulations show that transition skew coding is efficient in terms of energy and area with low encoding and decoding latency overhead.