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Synchronizer-Free Digital Link Controller.

Authors :
Bund, Johannes
Fugger, Matthias
Lenzen, Christoph
Medina, Moti
Source :
IEEE Transactions on Circuits & Systems. Part I: Regular Papers. Oct2020, Vol. 67 Issue 10, p3562-3573. 12p.
Publication Year :
2020

Abstract

This work presents a producer-consumer link between two independent clock domains. The link allows for metastability-free, low-latency, high-throughput communication by slight adjustments to the clock frequencies of the producer and consumer domains steered by a controller circuit. Any such controller cannot deterministically avoid, detect, nor resolve metastability. Typically, this is addressed by synchronizers, incurring a larger dead time in the control loop. We follow the approach of Friedrichs et al. (TC 2018) who proposed metastability-containing circuits. The result is a simple control circuit that may become metastable, yet deterministically avoids buffer underrun or overflow. More specifically, the controller output may become metastable, but this may only affect oscillator speeds within specific bounds. In contrast, communication is guaranteed to remain metastability-free. We formally prove correctness of the producer-consumer link and a possible implementation that has only small overhead. With SPICE simulations of the proposed implementation we further substantiate our claims. The simulation uses 65nm process running at roughly 2GHz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjects

Subjects :
*PHASE-locked loops

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
15498328
Volume :
67
Issue :
10
Database :
Academic Search Index
Journal :
IEEE Transactions on Circuits & Systems. Part I: Regular Papers
Publication Type :
Periodical
Accession number :
146222047
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSI.2020.2989552