Crosstalk alleviation for dynamic PLAs

Abstract

The dynamic PLA style has become popular in designing high performance microprocessors because of its high speed and predictable routing delay. However like all other dynamic circuits, dynamic PLAs have suffered from the crosstalk noise problem. In this paper, we propose two techniques to alleviate crosstalk noise for dynamic PLAs. The first technique makes use of the fact that depending on the ordering of product lines, some crosstalk does not cause errors in outputs. A proper ordering can greatly reduce the number of lines affected by crosstalk noise. For those product lines which can be affected by crosstalk, we attempt to reduce the parallel length by re-ordering the input and output lines. We have performed experiments on a large set of MCNC benchmark circuits. The results show that after re-ordering, 86.7% of product lines become crosstalk immune and need not be considered for crosstalk prevention. © 2002 IEEE.