Differential current-mode sensing for efficient on-chip global signaling

Abstract

We present a new on-chip signaling method that relies on differential current-mode sensing to improve both delay and energy dissipation compared to conventional inverter repeaters. The proposed method can be used for point-to-point as well as -to-1 connections. Several experimental point-to-point transceivers with different interconnect length and an inverter repeater-based interconnect were implemented in 0.11 m, 1.2 V CMOS. Hardware measurements indicate that the proposed current-sensed transceiver produces 65% of the delay/mm of a repeater-based transceiver while dissipating 51% of its average switching energy/mm for a 10 mm interconnect. An additional 10% energy reduction relative to the inverter-repeater transceiver is possible if shorter current pulses are transmitted through the interconnect.

Quasi-Resonant Interconnects: A Low Power, Low Latency Design Methodology

“…The resonance peak, therefore, shifts to a higher frequency. Note that the magnitude of the transfer function reaches 0.8 at a 5-GHz frequency, as determined from (5).…”

“…In this approach, a current sense amplifier at the far end of the line detects a current difference and converts it into a voltage difference. To improve both delay and energy dissipation, a transmitter generating a differential current detected by a current mode sense amplifier at the receiving end has been proposed in [5]. To accommodate differential operation, redundant circuitry is used.…”

A Survey Addressing on High Performance On-Chip VLSI Interconnect

“…It can operate at a much lower noise margin than the voltage-mode network, and at a much lower swing as well due to its immunity to power supply noise. All these translate into increased bandwidth performance [16], decreased delay and dynamic power dissipation and higher noise immunity. For these reasons, CMS technique becomes a better alternative than VMS scheme for on temporary and future high-speed noise-prone single chip systems.…”

On-chip data communication : analysis, optimization and circuit design

“…However, in many implementations [65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72], current-sensing amplifiers with low input impedance are used to create the resistive receiver impedance. A current-sensing receiver based on a trans-impedance amplifier, as shown in Figure 4.6a, was also used in this project [33,73].…”

“…Sense amplifiers (SA) are hence widely applied in e.g. logic, memories, I/O data receivers [158], A/D converters [159][160][161][162], and more recently also in on-chip transceivers [20,33,61,67,69,72,77,84,85,121,124].…”