The University of Southampton
University of Southampton Institutional Repository

Globally Wireless Locally Wired (GloWiLoW): A clock distribution network for many-core systems

Globally Wireless Locally Wired (GloWiLoW): A clock distribution network for many-core systems
Globally Wireless Locally Wired (GloWiLoW): A clock distribution network for many-core systems

Modern high-performance systems are now facing critical issues on delivering power-efficient and globally interconnected clock networks. Conventional metal-based interconnect has gradually reached its bottleneck with the technology scaling which limits system performance as the interconnect delay has already overweighed circuit gate delay. A typical clock distribution network (CDN) might consume up to 50% of the total chip power and could generate large phase delay and clock uncertainties due to its RC characteristic and unbalanced load. This paper proposes a novel hybrid wire-wireless CDN, which improves the performance of on-chip clock distribution significantly using embedded wireless clock transmitter and receiver fabrics. In particular, On-Off-Keying (OOK) transceivers are implemented for overall system simplicity and has achieved significant power-efficiency. Results indicate that the total propagation delay can be reduced to 39.4ps, which is 57 times lower than the conventional H-tree. Besides, the system clock skew can be predictable and limited only by the displacement of clock receivers. Less than 26.9ps of clock skew (6.7% of a clock period at 2.5GHz) could be found within the proposed CDN and hence, shows the promising potential of future high-performance on-chip clock distribution.

IEEE
Ding, Qian
c7228f74-158a-44b9-b875-3096d24258e8
Fletcher, Benjamin J.
b9ee2f3f-f125-47df-a73e-e61c0404d4c9
Mak, Terrence
0f90ac88-f035-4f92-a62a-7eb92406ea53
Ding, Qian
c7228f74-158a-44b9-b875-3096d24258e8
Fletcher, Benjamin J.
b9ee2f3f-f125-47df-a73e-e61c0404d4c9
Mak, Terrence
0f90ac88-f035-4f92-a62a-7eb92406ea53

Ding, Qian, Fletcher, Benjamin J. and Mak, Terrence (2018) Globally Wireless Locally Wired (GloWiLoW): A clock distribution network for many-core systems. In 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, ISCAS 2018 - Proceedings. vol. 2018-May, IEEE.. (doi:10.1109/ISCAS.2018.8351041).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Modern high-performance systems are now facing critical issues on delivering power-efficient and globally interconnected clock networks. Conventional metal-based interconnect has gradually reached its bottleneck with the technology scaling which limits system performance as the interconnect delay has already overweighed circuit gate delay. A typical clock distribution network (CDN) might consume up to 50% of the total chip power and could generate large phase delay and clock uncertainties due to its RC characteristic and unbalanced load. This paper proposes a novel hybrid wire-wireless CDN, which improves the performance of on-chip clock distribution significantly using embedded wireless clock transmitter and receiver fabrics. In particular, On-Off-Keying (OOK) transceivers are implemented for overall system simplicity and has achieved significant power-efficiency. Results indicate that the total propagation delay can be reduced to 39.4ps, which is 57 times lower than the conventional H-tree. Besides, the system clock skew can be predictable and limited only by the displacement of clock receivers. Less than 26.9ps of clock skew (6.7% of a clock period at 2.5GHz) could be found within the proposed CDN and hence, shows the promising potential of future high-performance on-chip clock distribution.

This record has no associated files available for download.

More information

Published date: 26 April 2018
Venue - Dates: 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, , Florence, Italy, 2018-05-27 - 2018-05-30

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 426997
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/426997
PURE UUID: f063f2d5-62d6-4cc5-87f5-6bbe6abf4f37
ORCID for Benjamin J. Fletcher: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-4957-1934

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 20 Dec 2018 17:30
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 23:29

Export record

Altmetrics

Contributors

Author: Qian Ding
Author: Benjamin J. Fletcher ORCID iD
Author: Terrence Mak

Download statistics

Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.

View more statistics

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact ePrints Soton: eprints@soton.ac.uk

ePrints Soton supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2

This repository has been built using EPrints software, developed at the University of Southampton, but available to everyone to use.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive cookies on the University of Southampton website.

×