AScalable,Timing-Safe,Network-on-ChipArchitecturewithanIntegrated ClockDistributionMethod

Growing system sizes together with increasing performance variability are making globally synchronous operation hard to realize. Mesochronous clocking constitutes a possible solution to the problems faced. The most fundamentalofproblemsfacedwhencommunicatingbetween mesochronously clocked regions concerns the possibility of data corruption caused by metastability. This paper presents an integrated communication and mesochronous clockingstrategy,whichavoidstimingrelatederrorswhile maintaining a globally synchronous system perspective. The architecture is scalable as timing integrity is based purely on local observations. It is demonstrated with a 90 nm CMOS standard cell network-on-chipdesign which implements completely timing-safe, global communication inamodularsystem.