A Resonant Global Clock Distribution for the Cell Broadband-Engine Processor

Resonant clocking techniques show promise in reducing global clock power and timing uncertainty (skew and jitter). By resonating the large global clock capacitance with an inductance, the energy used to charge the clock node each period can be recycled within the LC tank network, resulting in lower clock power. Additional power savings are realized by reducing the strength of clock drivers because only losses need to be overcome at resonance. Skew and jitter are improved due to the bandpass characteristic of the LC network and the use of fewer clock buffering stages. We describe how the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) processor is experimentally transformed to have a resonant-load global clock distribution similar to the one in (Chan et al., 2004).