HEX: scaling honeycombs is easier than scaling clock trees

Authors:
Danny Dolev;Matthias Függer;Christoph Lenzen;Martin Perner;Ulrich Schmid
Affiliations:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel;Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria;Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
Venue:
Proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
Year:
2013

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Abstract

We argue that grid structures are a very promising alternative to the standard approach for distributing a clock signal throughout VLSI circuits and other hardware devices. Traditionally, this is accomplished by a delay-balanced clock tree, which distributes the signal supplied by a single clock source via carefully engineered and buffered signal paths. Our approach, termed HEX, is based on a hexagonal grid with simple intermediate nodes, which both control the forwarding of clock ticks in the grid and supply them to nearby functional units. HEX is Byzantine fault-tolerant, in a way that scales with the grid size, self-stabilizing, and seamlessly integrates with multiple synchronized clock sources, as used in multi-synchronous Globally Synchronous Locally Asynchronous (GALS) architectures. Moreover, HEX guarantees a small clock skew between neighbors even for wire delays that are only moderately balanced. We provide both a theoretical analysis of the worst-case skew and simulation results that demonstrate very small typical skew in realistic runs.