• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.321-334
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• 2003

Globally-Asynchronous Locally-Synchronous (GALS) systems are worthy of notice as an adequate architecture for a large scaled chip design with guaranteeing easy designs and functional confidence. In this paper, we suggest an advanced structure of the interface unit which is indispensable for GALS systems by using stoppable clocks. The proposed interface unit is composed of a sender module and a receiver module. The sender module can carry out data transmission partially without the relation to an internal clock. We have designed it with 0.25${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$ standard cell library at the gate level and simulated its operation to show performance improvement. Finally, we constructed all example circuit with the interface unit and proved the correct operation of it.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.723-726
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• 2005

GALS (Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous) 시스템 기반의 SoC 설계에 필수적인 DI (Delay Insensitive) 데이터 전송방식 중 기존의 전압 모드 기반 설계 방식은 N 비트 데이터 전송에 물리적으로 2N+1 개의 도선이 필요하다. 이로 인한 전력 소모와 설계 복잡성을 줄이기 위해 N+1 개의 도선으로 N 비트 데이터를 전송할 수 있는 전류 모드 다치 논리 회로 기반 설계 방식이 연구되었다. 그러나, static 전력의 비중이 커 데이터 전송 속도가 낮을수록 전력 소모 측면에서 취약하고, 휴지 모드에서도 상당량의 전력을 소비한다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 문제점을 해결할 수 있는 전류 모드 기반 인코더와 디코더 회로를 제안하고, 이에 따른 새로운 전류 인코딩 기법을 설명한다. 마지막으로 기존의 전압 모드 및 전류 모드 방식과 delay, 전력 소비 측면에서 비교 데이터를 제시한다.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.46 no.8
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• pp.22-30
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• 2009

Due to high levels of integration and complexity, the Network-on-Chip (NoC) approach has emerged as a new design paradigm to overcome on-chip communication issues and data bandwidth limits in conventional SoC(System-on-Chip) design. In particular, exponentially growing of energy consumption caused by high frequency, synchronization and distributing a single global clock signal throughout the chip have become major design bottlenecks. To deal with these issues, a globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) design combined with low power techniques is considered. Such a design style fits nicely with the concept of voltage-frequency-islands (VFI) which has been recently introduced for achieving fine-grain system-level power management. In this paper, we propose an efficient design methodology that minimizes energy consumption by VFI partitioning on an NoC architecture as well as assigning supply and threshold voltage levels to each VFI. The proposed algorithm which find VFI and appropriate core (or processing element) supply voltage consists of traffic-aware core graph partitioning, communication contention delay-aware tile mapping, power variation-aware core dynamic voltage scaling (DVS), power efficient VFI merging and voltage update on the VFIs Simulation results show that average 10.3% improvement in energy consumption compared to other existing works.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.582-591
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• 2017

To address the wire complexity problem in large-scale globally asynchronous, locally synchronous systems, a current-mode ternary encoding scheme was devised for a two-phase asynchronous protocol. However, for data transmission through a very long wire, few studies have been conducted on reducing the long propagation delay in current-mode circuits. Hence, this paper proposes a current steering logic (CSL) that is able to minimize the long delay for the devised current-mode ternary encoding scheme. The CSL creates pulse signals that charge or discharge the output signal in advance for a short period of time, and as a result, helps prevent a slack in the current signals. The encoder and decoder circuits employing the CSL are implemented using $0.25-{\mu}m$ CMOS technology. The results of an HSPICE simulation show that the normal and optimal mode operations of the CSL achieve a delay reduction of 11.8% and 28.1%, respectively, when compared to the original scheme for a 10-mm wire. They also reduce the power-delay product by 9.6% and 22.5%, respectively, at a data rate of 100 Mb/s for the same wire length.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.10
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• pp.3361-3377
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• 2014

Synchronous computing models provided by real-time synchrony protocols, such as TTA [1] and PALS [2], greatly simplify the design, implementation, and verification of real-time distributed systems. However, their application to real systems has been limited since their assumptions on underlying systems are hard to satisfy. In particular, most previous real-time synchrony protocols hypothesize the existence of underlying fault tolerant real-time networks. This, however, might not be true in most soft real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a practical approach to a synchrony protocol, called Quality-Aware PALS (qPALS), which provides the benefits of a synchronous computing model in environments where no fault-tolerant real-time network is available. qPALS supports two flexible global synchronization protocols: one tailored for the performance and the other for the correctness of synchronization. Hence, applications can make a negotiation flexibly between performance and correctness. In qPALS, the Quality-of-Service (QoS) on synchronization and consistency is specified in a probabilistic manner, and the specified QoS is supported under dynamic and unpredictable network environments via a control-theoretic approach. Our simulation results show that qPALS supports highly reliable synchronization for critical events while still supporting the efficiency and performance even when the underlying network is not stable.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.43 no.1 s.343
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• pp.27-36
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• 2006

Conventional delay-insensitive (DI) data encodings usually require 2N+1 wires for transferring N-bit. To reduce complexity and power dissipation of wires in designing a large scaled chip, an encoder and a decoder circuits, where N-bit data transfer can be peformed with only N+l wires, are proposed. These circuits are based on a quasi delay-insensitive (QDI) model and designed by using current-mode multiple valued logic (CMMVL). The effectiveness of the proposed data transfer mechanism is validated by comparisons with conventional data transfer mechanisms using dual-rail and 1-of-4 encodings through simulation at the 0.25 um CMOS technology. In general, simulation results with wire lengths of 4 mm or larger show that the CMMVL scheme significantly reduces delay-power product ($D{\ast}P$) values of the dual-rail encoding with data rate of 5 MHz or more and the 1-of-4 encoding with data rate of 18 MHz or more. In addition, simulation results using the buffer-inserted dual-rail and 1-of-4 encodings for high performance with the wire length of 10 mm and 32-bit data demonstrate that the proposed CMMVL scheme reduces the D*P values of the dual-rail encoding with data rate of 4 MHz or more and 1-of-4 encoding with data rate of 25 MHz or more by up to $57.7\%\;and\;17.9\%,$ respectively.