Analyses of signaling techniques for self-timed systems

This work presents signaling techniques for global and local on-chip interconnects, namely voltage-mode and current-mode differential signaling and simultaneous bidirectional signaling. In the proposed approach, these techniques were applied along with the self-timed design methodology to the interconnects of the path metric unit of the Viterbi decoder, and to the global on-chip bus segment. The simulations are performed using 0.18 μm technology. These interconnects are compared in terms of power consumption, noise, and speed. The study considered in this paper revealed the possibilities of current-mode signaling in global on-chip interconnects, while for local interconnects, the optimal result is achieved by applying voltage-mode signaling.