Title :
Synchronous elasticization: Considerations for correct implementation and MiniMIPS case study
Author :
Kilada, Eliyah ; Das, Shomit ; Stevens, Kenneth
Author_Institution :
Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Abstract :
Latency insensitivity is a promising design paradigm in the nanometer era since it has potential benefits of increased modularity and robustness to variations. Synchronous elasticization is one approach (among others) of transforming an ordinary clocked circuit into a latency insensitive design. This paper presents practical considerations of elasticizing reconvergent fanouts. It also investigates the suitability of previously published as well as new join and fork implementations for usage in the elastic control network. We demonstrate that elasticization comes at a cost. Measurements of a MiniMIPS processor fabricated in a 0.5 μm node show that elasticization results in area and dynamic and idle power penalties of 29%, 13% and 58.3%, respectively, without any loss in performance. These measurements do not exploit the capability of pipeline bubbles that occur if one needs to have unpredictable interface latency, or to insert extra bubbles into a pipeline due to wire delays. We finally show the architectural performance advantage of eager over lazy protocols in the presence of bubbles in the MiniMIPS.
Keywords :
clocks; integrated circuit design; system-on-chip; MiniMIPS processor; SOC; clock circuit; latency insensitive design; lazy protocols; size 0.5 mum; synchronous elasticization approach; system on chip; wire delays; Clocks; Logic gates; Protocols; Registers; Synchronization; System-on-a-chip; Wire; Latency Insensitive Design; MiniMIPS; SOC; Synchronous Elasticity;
Conference_Titel :
VLSI System on Chip Conference (VLSI-SoC), 2010 18th IEEE/IFIP
Conference_Location :
Madrid
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4244-6469-2
DOI :
10.1109/VLSISOC.2010.5642631
