Current-sensing for crossbars

Author

Sinha, Manoj ; Burleson, Wayne

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Massachusetts Univ., Amherst, MA, USA

fYear

2001

fDate

6/23/1905 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

25

Lastpage

29

Abstract

Full crossbars provide a flexible solution to interconnectivity needed to support parallelism in modern FPGAs, VLIW architectures and on-chip, multiprocessors. Unfortunately, the speed and power consumption of these crossbars degrades drastically with increased connectivity. This paper applies current sensing and low swing driving techniques as a means to improve the performance of the full crossbar. Simulation results, using HSPICE for 0.13 μm, 1.5 V CMOS technology, show that current-mode sensing is faster than voltage mode counterpart by more than 25%. This gain in the speed increases significantly from 25% to more than 65%, when the capacitive load of the switches of the crossbar increases from 4 fF to 16 fF. The speed of the current mode sensing does not degrade by more than 10%, when the supply voltage of the driver is reduced by 50%

Keywords

CMOS digital integrated circuits; multiprocessor interconnection networks; switching circuits; 0.13 micron; 1.5 V; 4 to 16 fF; CMOS technology; FPGAs; VLIW architectures; crossbars; current-mode sensing; full crossbar; interconnectivity; low swing driving techniques; onchip multiprocessors; power consumption; speed improvement; switch capacitive load; CMOS technology; Circuit testing; Communication switching; Degradation; Driver circuits; Field programmable gate arrays; Impedance; Switches; VLIW; Voltage;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

ASIC/SOC Conference, 2001. Proceedings. 14th Annual IEEE International

Conference_Location

Arlington, VA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-6741-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ASIC.2001.954667

Filename

954667