An Automatic Bi-Directional Bus Repeater Control Scheme Using Dynamic Collaborative Driving Techniques

Masahiro NOMURA  Taku OHSAWA  Koichi TAKEDA  Yoetsu NAKAZAWA  Yoshinori HIROTA  Yasuhiko HAGIHARA  Naoki NISHI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E89-C   No.3   pp.334-341
Publication Date: 2006/03/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
DOI: 10.1093/ietele/e89-c.3.334
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on VLSI Design Technology in the Sub-100 nm Era)
Category: Interface and Interconnect Techniques
Keyword: 
repeater,  bi-directional bus,  automatic direction control,  collaborative driving technique,  

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Summary: 
This paper describes a newly developed automatic direction control scheme for bi-directional bus repeaters that uses dynamic collaborative driving techniques. Repeater directions are rapidly determined by detecting the direction of control signal propagation through an additional control signal line that is driven by dynamic collaborative drivers. Application to an on-chip peripheral bus reduces control circuit transistor counts by about 75% and the number of control signal lines by about 50% without loss of speed. Experimental results for a 0.18-µm CMOS implementation indicate that the proposed scheme is four times faster than a conventional scheme with no bi-directional bus repeaters.