LIME: A Low-latency and Low-complexity On-chip Mesochronous Link with Integrated Flow Control

This work presents a low-complexity physical link micro architecture for a mesochronous on-chip communication insensitive to clock skew. This new link architecture, called LIME, integrates a low-latency flow control scheme; this feature may ease the set up of reliable Network-on-Chip infrastructures. The proposed architecture also supports virtual channels that are multiplexed on a single physical link. LIME can be integrated in a conventional digital design flow since it is implemented by means of standard cells only.