Mesochronous Clock Based Synchronizer Design for NoC

Abstract

Network on a chip(NoC) is a communication subsystem between intellectual property(IP) cores in a SoC and improves high performance in the scalability and the power efficiency compared with conventional buses and crossbar switches. NoC needs a synchronizer to overcome the metastability problem between data links. This paper presents a new mesochronous synchronizer(MS) which is composed of selection window generator, selection signal generator, and data buffer. A delay line circuit is used to build selection window in selection window generator based on the delayed clock cycle of transmitted clock and the transmitted clock is compared with local clock to generate a selection signal in the SW(selection window). This MS gets rid of the restriction of metastability by choosing a rising edge or a falling edge of local clock according to the value of selection signal. The simulation results show that the proposed MS operates correctly for all phase differences between a transmitted clock and a local clock.