Transparent Pipelining

The nice thing about posting in such a site, is that one learns quite a bit with time. During the long pause I took, I tried to read quite a bit and look for some interesting papers. Yes, I am aware that most of my readers are not really interested in reading technical papers for fun, but the bunch that I collected are IMHO quite important and teach a lot.

The one for today is about a novel clocking scheme for latch based pipelines. I found it really interesting and important. I am sure that sometime I am going to implement this for a future design. The paper could have had more examples, and I bet that a few animations would only do good for that topic – but you can’t really ask for stuff like that in a technical paper, can you?

OK, enough of my words – you can find the paper here.

Latch Based Design Robustness

Latch based design is usually not given enough attention by digital designers. There are many reasons for that, some are very well based, other reasons are just because latch based design is just unknown and looked at as a strange beast.

I intend to have a serious of posts concerning latch based design issues. I have to admit that most of my design experience was gained doing flip flop based designs, but the latch based designs I did were always interesting and challenging. If any of you readers have some interesting latch based design examples please send them over to my email and I will include them in later posts.

Just to start the ball rolling, here is a very interesting paper on the robustness of latch based design with comparison to flip flop based design. If you don’t have the time to go through the entire paper just look at figure 1 and its description.

I also added this paper to the list of recommended reading list.