An Automatic Bi-Directional Bus Repeater Control Scheme Using Dynamic Collaborative Driving Techniques

This paper describes a newly developed automatic direction control scheme for bi-directional bus repeaters that uses dynamic collaborative driving techniques. Repeater directions are rapidly determined by detecting the direction of control signal propagation through an additional control signal line that is driven by dynamic collaborative drivers. Application to an on-chip peripheral bus reduces control circuit transistor counts by about 75% and the number of control signal lines by about 50% without loss of speed. Experimental results for a 0.18-μm CMOS implementation indicate that the proposed scheme is four times faster than a conventional scheme with no bi-directional bus reneaters.