Injection-Locked Clocking: A Low-Power Clock Distribution Scheme for High-Performance Microprocessors

Recently we proposed a new clocking scheme, injection-locked clocking (ILC), to combat deteriorating clock skew and jitter, and hence reduce power consumption in highperformance microprocessors. In the new clocking scheme, injection-locked oscillators are used as local clock receivers. It can achieve better power efficiency and jitter performance than conventional buffered trees with the additional benefit of builtin deskewing. Unlike other alternatives, ILC is fully compatible with conventional clock distribution. In this paper, a quantitative study based on circuit and microarchitectural-level simulations is conducted to verify the performance and power improvements using ILC. Alpha21264 is used as the baseline processor, and is scaled to 0.13

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TVLSI
• Authors: Lin Zhang, A. Carpenter, Berkehan Ciftcioglu, Alok Garg, Michael C. Huang, Hui Wu
• Keywords: Clocks, Jitter, Local Clocks, TVLSI 2008