A Globally Wireless Locally Wired Hybrid Clock Distribution Network for Many-Core Systems
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON A Globally Wireless Locally Wired Hybrid Clock Distribution Network for Many-core Systems by Qian Ding A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Science School of Electronics and Computer Science February 2021 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON ABSTRACT FACULTY OF ENGINEERING AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES SCHOOL OF ELECTRONICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE Doctor of Philosophy A Globally Wireless Locally Wired Hybrid Clock Distribution Network for Many-core Systems by Qian Ding Modern ICs are now facing critical issues on generating power-efficient and globally interconnected clock networks, as the clock distribution network might contribute to more than 50% of the overall power consumption. Besides, due to the increasing wire delay caused by shrinking interconnect dimensions, synchronous many-core systems are now facing challenges such as to propagate high-frequency clock signals across the chip with limited power budget. Delivering a clock with low uncertainties across active dies with large chip density has also become one of the major tasks using conventional metallic interconnects. This thesis presents a novel architecture and comprehensive evaluations for a power- efficient and extremely low-delay approach using hybrid wire-wireless clock distribution network (CDN). The proposed hybrid CDN adopts wireless on-chip clock transmitters and receivers for broadcasting the clock signal globally. It then incorporates with conven- tional metal-based clock tree or mesh for local clock distribution. Comparisons between the proposed approach and two baseline architectures, namely a full fan-out tree and a global tree local mesh (TLM) structure, have been presented. Also, an accurate math- ematical model with interconnect RLC parameters for the local clock distribution is employed. The hybrid CDN has shown its superiority in terms of low clock delay, low clock skew and high energy efficiency compared with conventional solutions, which is evaluated via an industrial standard Arm Mali G77 GPU case study. Experimental results indicate that the proposed clock distribution network can achieve a significant global delay reduction of up to 28.8%. Also, on average, an up to 62.8% and 42.7% reduction in clock skew and power consumption, are identified, respectively, in our proposed test bench. Hence, our proposed approach offers a promising solution to clock distribution in future many-core integrated circuits, especially for high-performance systems. Contents Nomenclature xv Acknowledgements xvii 1 Introduction1 1.1 Challenges of the Conventional Interconnect.................1 1.2 Motivations for the Proposed Hybrid Clock Distribution Scheme.....6 1.2.1 The Impact of Wire Delay.......................6 1.2.2 Synchronisation in Modern Many-Core Systems...........8 1.3 Thesis Contributions and Structures..................... 11 2 Literature Review 15 2.1 Reviewing of the Emerging Interconnect Techniques............ 15 2.1.1 Wireless Interconnect......................... 15 2.1.2 Other Radio-frequency Based Interconnects............. 17 2.1.3 Optical Interconnect.......................... 19 2.2 Conventional CDN with Broadcast Architecture............... 20 2.2.1 Combination of Binary-tree, H-tree, X-tree and Clock Grid.... 21 2.2.2 Challenges of Existing Metallic Wire-based CDN.......... 24 2.3 Optical CDN with Broadcast Architecture.................. 26 2.3.1 Guided and Free-space Optical CDN................. 26 2.3.2 Challenges of Existing Optical CDN................. 28 2.4 Wireless CDN with Broadcast Architecture................. 28 2.4.1 Wireless CDN with VCO and Frequency Divider.......... 29 2.4.2 Wireless CDN with Digital Modulation Techniques......... 30 2.4.3 Challenges of Existing Wireless CDN................. 32 2.5 Summary.................................... 33 3 Proposed Models and Algorithms for Local Wired CDN 35 3.1 Delay Models of Conventional CDN..................... 35 3.2 Model of the Tree-based CDN......................... 41 3.2.1 Balanced Bi-partitioning Algorithm for Clock Tree Synthesis... 44 3.2.2 K-means Bi-partitioning (KBP) Algorithm for Clock Tree Synthesis 47 3.2.3 Merging Tree Generation....................... 51 3.2.4 Buffer Insertion with Inverted Slew-estimation........... 53 3.3 Model of the Mesh-based CDN........................ 55 3.3.1 Isolated Mesh Model.......................... 55 3.3.2 Coupled Mesh Model.......................... 57 v vi CONTENTS 3.3.3 Clock Receiver Planning........................ 59 3.3.4 Local Mesh Design........................... 60 3.4 Model of the Proposed Hybrid Wireless-Wired CDN............ 62 3.5 Summary.................................... 66 4 Proposed Clock Transmitter and Receiver for Global Wireless CDN 67 4.1 Clock Transmitter Design........................... 69 4.1.1 Voltage-Controlled Oscillator Design................. 69 4.1.2 On-Off Keying Modulator Design................... 71 4.2 Clock Receiver Design............................. 75 4.2.1 Low Noise Amplifier Design...................... 75 4.2.2 On-Off Keying Demodulator Design................. 78 4.3 On-chip Antenna Design............................ 80 4.4 Summary.................................... 83 5 Experimental Setup and Evaluations of the Proposed Hybrid CDN 85 5.1 Results of the Proposed Antenna for Hybrid CDN............. 86 5.2 Results of the Proposed Clock Transmitter................. 92 5.3 Results of the Proposed Clock Receiver................... 95 5.4 Impacts of the Local Parameters on Global CDN Performance....... 100 5.5 Summary.................................... 108 6 Case Study: the Proposed CDN Verified by Testbench Circuits 111 6.1 Architectures of the Proposed Test Case................... 111 6.2 Test Case Circuit Generations and Experimental Setup.......... 114 6.3 Test Case Results and Analysis........................ 116 6.4 Summary.................................... 118 7 Conclusions and Future Works 121 7.1 Conclusions and Contributions of the Thesis................. 121 7.2 Challenges of the Thesis............................ 123 7.3 Potential Future Works............................ 124 7.3.1 Short Term Future Works....................... 124 7.3.2 Long Term Future Works....................... 125 Bibliography 127 List of Figures 1.1 Simplified interconnect structure........................3 1.2 Simplified interconnect structures with wiring capacitance..........4 1.3 The propagation delay vs shrinking technology node for transistor gate delay, local communication delay and global communication delay, respec- tively, according to [1]..............................5 1.4 Increasing interconnect delay within a specific 4-level H-tree network with (a) interconnect delay under different technology nodes using the same geometry, and (b) Increasing delay gap between 90 nm and 10 nm process. c 2021 IEEE ..................................6 1.5 A typical structure of (a) plan view of a conventional mesh-based CDN and (b) π-model of the mesh wires.......................7 1.6 The proposed hybrid clock distribution network which combines both global wireless interconnect and local metallic wires............. 10 2.1 Wireless interconnect with WCube as application [2]. Wireless intercon- nect serves as the global communication channel............... 16 2.2 A typical structure of (a) surface-wave interconnect (SWI) and (b) trans- mission line interconnect (Tx-line) for global communication........ 18 2.3 An global H-tree constructed using optical interconnect to distribute clock signals....................................... 19 2.4 Identifying the start and the endpoints of a typical clock tree in a design. 21 2.5 A typical structure of (a) single and big buffer/driver insertion strategy in a CDN and (b) the distributed and small buffer/driver insertion strategy in a CDN..................................... 22 2.6 Buffered-tree with local clock grid for DEC Alpha 21064 clock distribution structure..................................... 23 2.7 A typical structure of global tree and local mesh (TLM) clock distribution scheme...................................... 23 2.8 A typical structure of interconnect model from PTM with (a) global and (b) local wiring structure [3].......................... 25 2.9 CDN architecture for global optical guided interconnect and local metallic H-tree....................................... 26 2.10 Stack-up schematic of the optical CDN proposed in [4]........... 26 2.11 Free-space optical interconnect with (a) unfocused and (b) focused clock broadcast architecture [5]............................ 27 2.12 General architecture of a wireless CDN with integrated wireless clock transmitter and receivers............................ 29 2.13 Block diagrams of wireless CDN [6] with (a) clock transmitter and (b) clock receiver................................... 30 vii viii LIST OF FIGURES 2.14 Wireless CDN transceiver architecture in [7] with 5.6mm propagation distance...................................... 31 2.15 Simplified 64-QAM wireless interconnect architecture [8] with (a) trans- mitter and (b) receiver............................. 32 3.1 Conventional metallic interconnect structure and its lumped RC model.. 36 3.2 Distributed lumped circuit structure for improved accuracy of intercon- nect model.................................... 37 3.3 Conventional tapered H-tree network as baseline architecture with 16 fan- out nodes..................................... 39 3.4 A k-level H-tree modelled as a folded binary