Skewed Repeater Bus: A Low-Power Scheme for On-Chip Buses

Abstract

This paper purposes a bus architecture called skewed repeater bus (SRB) for reducing on-chip interconnect energy in microprocessors. By introducing a dynamic relative delay between neighboring bus lines, SRB reduces both average and worst-case coupling capacitance between those lines. SRB is compared to previously published techniques like delayed data bus (DDB) and delayed clock bus (DCB). Simulation results in 65-nm process show that bus energy reduction of 18% is achieved when SRB is applied to a real microprocessor example, versus 11% and 7% only for DDB and DCB, respectively.