Asynchronous 2-Phase Protocol Based on Ternary Encoding for On-Chip Interconnect

Abstract

Level-encoded dual-rail (LEDR) has been widely used in on-chip asynchronous interconnects supporting a 2-phase handshake protocol. However, it inevitably requires 2N wires for N-bit data transfers. Encoder and decoder circuits that perform an asynchronous 2-phase handshake protocol with only N wires for N-bit data transfers are presented for on-chip global interconnects. Their fundamentals are based on a ternary encoding scheme using current-mode multiple valued logics. Using 0.25 μm CMOS technologies, the maximum reduction ratio of the proposed circuits, compared with LEDR in terms of power-delay product, was measured as 39.5% at a wire length of 10 mm and data rate of 100 MHz.