Design of a novel differential on-chip wave-pipelined serial interconnect with surfing

In the literature, surfing technique has been proposed for single ended wave-pipelined serial interconnects to increase the data transfer rate. This uses uniform repeaters (UR). In this paper, two novel surfing techniques, one using uniform repeaters (UR) and another using non-uniform repeaters (NUR) are proposed for differential wave-pipelined serial interconnects. The method of logical effort is also proposed for the design of both UR and NUR. To evaluate the efficiency of these techniques, 40 mm metal 4 interconnects using the proposed surfing techniques are implemented along with transmitter, receiver and delay locked loop(DLL) in UMC 180 nm technology and their performances are studied through post layout simulations. From this study, it is observed that the differential surfing technique using UR and NUR achieve 3.0 times and 4.15 times higher data rates respectively compared to the single ended scheme whose maximum data rate is 1.33 GB/s.