Optimal pipeline stage balancing in the presence of large isolated interconnect delay

01 Pubblicazione su rivista
Olivieri Mauro, Menichelli Francesco, Mastrandrea Antonio
ISSN: 0013-5194

Pipelining a combinational logic data-path without introducing pipeline stage delay imbalance is a key requirement for efficient digital processing. Balanced pipelining is easily achieved by simple logical effort optimisation when the interconnect and fan-out delay overhead is small and homogeneously distributed. When the target microarchitecture design includes isolated long interconnects, such as buses, optimal pipeline stage balancing becomes a tricky problem. This work formalises the solution based on the logical effort paradigm and evidences its advantage with respect to a heuristic approach.

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