Wave - pipelining : A tutorial and survey of recent research 1

Wave-pipelining is a method of high-performance circuit design which implements pipelin-ing in logic without the use of intermediate latches or registers. This paper presents a tutorial of the principles of wave-pipelining and a survey of recent wave-pipelined VLSI chips and CAD tools for the synthesis and analysis of wave-pipelined circuits. Wave-pipelining has recently drawn considerable interest from both the academic and industrial communities. 2 The combination of high-performance IC technologies, pipelined architectures, and sophisticated CAD tools has converted wave-pipelining from a theoretical oddity into a realistic, although challenging, VLSI design method. In its crudest form, wave-pipelining is plagued with problems due to process variation, data-dependent delays, and two-sided clock period constraints. However, like clock skew in high-speed synchronous systems, these problems can be mitigated by innovative circuit structures, CAD tools and systematic design. The result is a higher performance circuit in exchange for an often acceptable increase in area.