Surfing Pipelines: Theory and Implementation
Suwen Yang, Brian D.\ Winters and Mark R. Greenstreet
IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits (2007)
Surfing is a latchless pipelining technique where the propagation
delays of gates and other logic functions are modulated to produce
event attractors. Timing events are propagated along the pipeline
and events in the data path are attracted to coincide with
the timing events. These attractors reduce timing uncertainties
and can reduce the delays of the pipeline.
We demonstrate surfing by the design, fabrication and test of a chip.
The surfing ring in this chip supports two independent waves of
computation separated only by the surfing effect --- no latches or
other storage elements are used.
We operated the ring for over 48 hours and 2e15
surfing events and never observed an error.