Dynamic clamping: on-chip dynamic shielding and termination for high-speed RLC buses

This paper presents a novel approach called dynamic clamping for minimizing crosstalk noise and inductive effects in global buses. A simple circuit is shown that can be used to dynamically shield and terminate high-speed RLC buses. Unlike traditional passive shielding and parallel termination, dynamic clamping has no area overhead and no static power dissipation. Dynamic clamping enables significant reductions in noise (∼35%) and inductive overshoot (∼90%) with a small delay penalty (∼10%). We also propose using bus-invert coding with our approach as dynamic clamping is seen to give excellent results for low to moderate bus activity.