| Title: | Surfing Pipelines |
| Date: |
January 31, 2008 (Thursday)
|
| Time: |
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon
|
| Venue: |
Room 1021, 10/F, Ho Sin-hang Engineering Building,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T. |
| Speaker: |
Miss Suwen Yang
PhD candidate University of British Columbia Canada |
Surfing is a novel pipelining technique where the delay of logic elements are modulated by a timing signal to create event attractors. This causes the transition times of the logic elements to coincide with those of the timing signal. Surfing can be seen as a variant of wave pipelining where the gap between the maximum and minimum delay of the logic circuits is bounded by a small value, independent of the length of the pipeline. This makes surfing pipelines more robuts than wave pipelines and allows them to be used in applications where traditional wave pipelining would be unacceptable.
We describe the basic principles of surfing pipelines and then show several examples of surfing circuits. First, we show a proof-of-concept chip that we implemented that has a 12-stage surfing ring with no latches, flip-flops or other storage elements. We have operated this ring for over 48 hours with two, independent waves of computation, without any errors. We then show novel circuits that we developed to achieve higher speed and lower power than the corresponding domino-logic designs. Finally, I will describe my current research in applying surfing to on-chip interconnect, including a novel DLL circuit for propagating timing signals across a chip between independent timing domains.
BIOGRAPHY:
Suwen Yang received her Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 1995. In 2005, she received her Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia. Currently, she is pursuing in her PhD degree at the University of British Columbia. Her main research interests include high-speed circuit design and verification. She is currently a part-time intern at Sun Microsystems.
Enquiries: Miss Temmy So at tel 2609 8444
For more information, please refer to http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/seminar