Synthesis of all-digital delay lines

© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThe synthesis of delay lines (DLs) is a core task during the generation of matched delays, ring oscillator clocks or delay monitors. The main figure of merit of a DL is the fidelity to track variability. Unfortunately, complex systems have a great diversity of timing paths that exhibit different sensitivities to static and dynamic variations. Designing DLs that capture this diversity is an ardous task. This paper proposes an algorithmic approach for the synthesis of DLs that can be integrated in a conventional design flow. The algorithm uses heuristics to perform a combinatorial search in a vast space of solutions that combine different types of gates and wire lengths. The synthesized DLs are (1) all digital, i.e., built of conventional standard cells, (2) accurate in tracking variability and (3) configurable at runtime. Experimental results with a commercial standard cell library confirm the quality of the DLs that only exhibit delay mismatches of about 1% on average over all PVT corners.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Area/latency optimized early output asynchronous full adders and relative-timed ripple carry adders

This article presents two area/latency optimized gate level asynchronous full adder designs which correspond to early output logic. The proposed full adders are constructed using the delay-insensitive dual-rail code and adhere to the four-phase return-to-zero handshaking. For an asynchronous ripple carry adder (RCA) constructed using the proposed early output full adders, the relative-timing assumption becomes necessary and the inherent advantages of the relative-timed RCA are: (1) computation with valid inputs, i.e., forward latency is data-dependent, and (2) computation with spacer inputs involves a bare minimum constant reverse latency of just one full adder delay, thus resulting in the optimal cycle time. With respect to different 32-bit RCA implementations, and in comparison with the optimized strong-indication, weak-indication, and early output full adder designs, one of the proposed early output full adders achieves respective reductions in latency by 67.8, 12.3 and 6.1 %, while the other proposed early output full adder achieves corresponding reductions in area by 32.6, 24.6 and 6.9 %, with practically no power penalty. Further, the proposed early output full adders based asynchronous RCAs enable minimum reductions in cycle time by 83.4, 15, and 8.8 % when considering carry-propagation over the entire RCA width of 32-bits, and maximum reductions in cycle time by 97.5, 27.4, and 22.4 % for the consideration of a typical carry chain length of 4 full adder stages, when compared to the least of the cycle time estimates of various strong-indication, weak-indication, and early output asynchronous RCAs of similar size. All the asynchronous full adders and RCAs were realized using standard cells in a semi-custom design fashion based on a 32/28 nm CMOS process technology

Latency Optimized Asynchronous Early Output Ripple Carry Adder based on Delay-Insensitive Dual-Rail Data Encoding

Asynchronous circuits employing delay-insensitive codes for data representation i.e. encoding and following a 4-phase return-to-zero protocol for handshaking are generally robust. Depending upon whether a single delay-insensitive code or multiple delay-insensitive code(s) are used for data encoding, the encoding scheme is called homogeneous or heterogeneous delay-insensitive data encoding. This article proposes a new latency optimized early output asynchronous ripple carry adder (RCA) that utilizes single-bit asynchronous full adders (SAFAs) and dual-bit asynchronous full adders (DAFAs) which incorporate redundant logic and are based on the delay-insensitive dual-rail code i.e. homogeneous data encoding, and follow a 4-phase return-to-zero handshaking. Amongst various RCA, carry lookahead adder (CLA), and carry select adder (CSLA) designs, which are based on homogeneous or heterogeneous delay-insensitive data encodings which correspond to the weak-indication or the early output timing model, the proposed early output asynchronous RCA that incorporates SAFAs and DAFAs with redundant logic is found to result in reduced latency for a dual-operand addition operation. In particular, for a 32-bit asynchronous RCA, utilizing 15 stages of DAFAs and 2 stages of SAFAs leads to reduced latency. The theoretical worst-case latencies of the different asynchronous adders were calculated by taking into account the typical gate delays of a 32/28nm CMOS digital cell library, and a comparison is made with their practical worst-case latencies estimated. The theoretical and practical worst-case latencies show a close correlation....Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1704.0761

Asynchronous Early Output Dual-Bit Full Adders Based on Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Delay-Insensitive Data Encoding

This paper presents the designs of asynchronous early output dual-bit full adders without and with redundant logic (implicit) corresponding to homogeneous and heterogeneous delay-insensitive data encoding. For homogeneous delay-insensitive data encoding only dual-rail i.e. 1-of-2 code is used, and for heterogeneous delay-insensitive data encoding 1-of-2 and 1-of-4 codes are used. The 4-phase return-to-zero protocol is used for handshaking. To demonstrate the merits of the proposed dual-bit full adder designs, 32-bit ripple carry adders (RCAs) are constructed comprising dual-bit full adders. The proposed dual-bit full adders based 32-bit RCAs incorporating redundant logic feature reduced latency and area compared to their non-redundant counterparts with no accompanying power penalty. In comparison with the weakly indicating 32-bit RCA constructed using homogeneously encoded dual-bit full adders containing redundant logic, the early output 32-bit RCA comprising the proposed homogeneously encoded dual-bit full adders with redundant logic reports corresponding reductions in latency and area by 22.2% and 15.1% with no associated power penalty. On the other hand, the early output 32-bit RCA constructed using the proposed heterogeneously encoded dual-bit full adder which incorporates redundant logic reports respective decreases in latency and area than the weakly indicating 32-bit RCA that consists of heterogeneously encoded dual-bit full adders with redundant logic by 21.5% and 21.3% with nil power overhead. The simulation results obtained are based on a 32/28nm CMOS process technology

Low-power digital processor for wireless sensor networks

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-72).In order to make sensor networks cost-effective and practical, the electronic components of a wireless sensor node need to run for months to years on the same battery. This thesis explores the design of a low-power digital processor for these sensor nodes, employing techniques such as hardwired algorithms, lowered supply voltages, clock gating and subsystem shutdown. Prototypes were built on both a FPGA and ASIC platform, in order to verify functionality and characterize power consumption. The resulting 0.18[micro]m silicon fabricated in National Semiconductor Corporation's process was operational for supply voltages ranging from 0.5V to 1.8V. At the lowest operating voltage of 0.5V and a frequency of 100KHz, the chip performs 8 full-accuracy FFT computations per second and draws 1.2nJ of total energy per cycle. Although this energy/cycle metric does not surpass existing low-energy processors demonstrated in literature or commercial products, several low-power techniques are suggested that could drastically improve the energy metrics of a future implementation.by Daniel Frederic Finchelstein.S.M

Low Power Digital Design using Asynchronous Logic

This thesis summarizes research undertaken at San José State University between January 2009 and May 2011, which introduces a new method of achieving low power by reducing the dependency of the clock signal in the design. A clock signal consumes power even when the circuit is idle, but asynchronous circuits by default move into the idle state and involve no transition in the circuit during that state. In addition, in an active system, only the subsystem that is in use dissipates power. This work mainly focused on obtaining low power by implementing asynchronous logic. The work also studied the measure of power consumption using asynchronous logic by designing a simple Display Controller. The Display Controller was designed using Verilog HDL and synthesized using Synopsys Design Compiler. The work also studied the trade–offs in power, area, and design complexity in asynchronous design. The power consumed by the synchronous and asynchronous display controllers was measured, and the asynchronous design consumed about 17% less power than its synchronous counterpart. The area of the asynchronous design was twice that of the synchronous one. Power can be reduced by reducing the dependency of the clock signal in the design by choosing asynchronous logic

An Energy-Efficient Reconfigurable Circuit Switched Network-on-Chip

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an energy-efficient on-chip communication architecture for multi-tile System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. The SoC architecture, including its run-time software, can replace inflexible ASICs for future ambient systems. These ambient systems have to be flexible as well as energy-efficient. To find an energy-efficient solution for the communication network we analyze three wireless applications. Based on their communication requirements we observe that revisiting of the circuit switching techniques is beneficial. In this paper we propose a new energy-efficient reconfigurable circuit-switched Network-on-Chip. By physically separating the concurrent data streams we reduce the overall energy consumption. The circuit-switched router has been synthesized and analyzed for its power consumption in 0.13 ¿m technology. A 5-port circuit-switched router has an area of 0.05 mm2 and runs at 1075 MHz. The proposed architecture consumes 3.5 times less energy compared to its packet-switched equivalen