Maximal Clocking Rates For Pipelined Digital Systems

The Microarchitecture of Pipelined and Superscalar Computers

This book is intended to serve as a textbook for a second course in the im plementation (Le. microarchitecture) of computer architectures. The subject matter covered is the collection of techniques that are used to achieve the highest performance in single-processor machines; these techniques center the exploitation of low-level parallelism (temporal and spatial) in the processing of machine instructions. The target audience consists students in the final year of an undergraduate program or in the first year of a postgraduate program in computer science, computer engineering, or electrical engineering; professional computer designers will also also find the book useful as an introduction to the topics covered. Typically, the author has used the material presented here as the basis of a full-semester undergraduate course or a half-semester post graduate course, with the other half of the latter devoted to multiple-processor machines. The background assumed of the reader is a good first course in computer architecture and implementation - to the level in, say, Computer Organization and Design, by D. Patterson and H. Hennessy - and familiarity with digital-logic design. The book consists of eight chapters: The first chapter is an introduction to all of the main ideas that the following chapters cover in detail: the topics covered are the main forms of pipelining used in high-performance uniprocessors, a taxonomy of the space of pipelined processors, and performance issues. It is also intended that this chapter should be readable as a brief "stand-alone" survey.

Wave Pipelining: Theory and CMOS Implementation

The quest for higher performance digital systems for applications such as gen eral purpose computing, signal/image processing, and telecommunications and an increasing cost consciousness have led to a major thrust for high speed VLSI systems implemented in inexpensive and widely available technologies such as CMOS. This monograph, based on the first author's doctoral dissertation, con centrates on the technique of wave pipelining as one method toward achieving this goal. The primary focus of this monograph is to provide a coherent pre sentation of the theory of wave pipelined operation of digital circuits and to discuss practical design techniques for the realization of wave pipelined circuits in the CMOS technology. Wave pipelining can be applied to a variety of cir cuits for increased performance. For example, many architectures that support systolic computation lend themselves to wave pipelined realization. Also, the wave pipeline design methodology emphasizes the role of controlled clock skew in extracting enhanced performance from circuits that are not deeply pipelined. Wave pipelining (also known as maximal rate pipelining) is a timing method ology used in digital systems to increase the number of effective pipeline stages without increasing the number of physical registers in the pipeline. Using this technique, new data is applied to the inputs of a combinational logic block be fore the outputs due to previous inputs are available thus effectively pipelining the combinational logic and maximizing the utilization of the logic.

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