Surfing Pipelines: Theory and Implementation

Surfing is a latchless pipelining technique where the propagation delays of gates and other logic functions are modulated to produce event attractors. Timing events are propagated along the pipeline and events in the data path are attracted to coincide with the timing events. These attractors reduce timing uncertainties and can reduce the delays of the pipeline. We demonstrate surfing by the design, fabrication, and test of a chip. The surfing ring in this chip supports two independent waves of computation separated only by the surfing effect-no latches or other storage elements are used. We operated the ring for over 48 h and 2 times 10¹⁵ surfing events and never observed an error.