Hierarchical design of a low power standing wave oscillator based clock distribution network

This paper introduces a hierarchical clock interconnection network with two-level bufferless standing wave resonant clock distribution to minimize the clock power consumption in a synchronous system. The first level is a serpentine network which consists of many coupled standing wave oscillators to distribute clock signals in the whole chip area. The second level is a group of fishbone architectures connected to the standing wave oscillators to route clock signals in the local areas. A clock synthesis flow for the fishbone architecture is also introduced to enable design automation. This fishbone architecture is studied through a pipelined floating-point fused multiply-add module under 28nm standard CMOS process. Simulation results show that, this architecture can reduce more than 30% clock power consumption compared with a traditional buffered clock network.

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