Title :
Eliminating Synchronization Latency Using Sequenced Latching
Author :
Tarawneh, Ghaith ; Yakovlev, Alex ; Mak, Terrence
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Electr. & Electron. Eng., Newcastle Univ., Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Abstract :
Modern multicore systems have a large number of components operating in different clock domains and communicating through asynchronous interfaces. These interfaces use synchronizer circuits, which guard against metastability failures but introduce latency in processing the asynchronous input. We propose a speculative method that hides synchronization latency by overlapping it with computation cycles. We verify the correctness of our approach through a field programmable gate array implementation and apply it to a number of synthesized benchmarks. Synthesis results reveal that our approach achieves average savings of 135% and 204% in area costs and nearly 100% in power costs compared to two similar speculative techniques.
Keywords :
asynchronous circuits; field programmable gate arrays; flip-flops; synchronisation; asynchronous interface; field programmable gate array implementation; metastability failure; multicore system; sequenced latching; synchronization latency elimination; synchronizer circuit; Delay; Latches; Pipelines; Receivers; Silicon; Synchronization; Duplication; latency; metastability; speculation; synchronization;
Journal_Title :
Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TVLSI.2013.2243177