[Back]


Talks and Poster Presentations (with Proceedings-Entry):

D. Dolev, C. Lenzen, M Függer, U. Schmid, M. Perner:
"HEX: Scaling Honeycombs is Easier than Scaling Clock Trees";
Talk: SPAA '13, Montreal, Canada; 2013-07-23 - 2013-07-25; in: "Proceedings of the 25th ACM symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures", ACM, (2013), ISBN: 978-1-4503-1572-2; 164 - 175.



English abstract:
We argue that grid structures are a very promising alternative to the standard
approach for distributing a clock signal throughout VLSI circuits and other
hardware devices. Traditionally, this is accomplished by a delay-balanced clock
tree, which distributes the signal supplied by a single clock source via
carefully engineered and buffered signal paths.

Our approach, termed HEX, is based on a hexagonal grid with simple intermediate
nodes, which both control the forwarding of clock ticks in the grid and supply
them to nearby functional units. HEX is Byzantine fault-tolerant, in a way that
scales with the grid size, self-stabilizing, and seamlessly integrates with
multiple synchronized clock sources, as used in multi-synchronous Globally
Synchronous Locally Asynchronous (GALS) architectures. Moreover, HEX guarantees
a small clock skew between neighbors even for wire delays that are only
moderately balanced. We provide both a theoretical analysis of the worst-case
skew and simulation results that demonstrate very small typical skew in
realistic runs.

Keywords:
fault-tolerant distributed algorithms; time distribution in grids; Byzantine fault-tolerance; self-stabilization


"Official" electronic version of the publication (accessed through its Digital Object Identifier - DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2486159.2486192


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.