Race-Free Clocking of CMOS Pipelines through a Single Global Clock

Abstract

To ease global clock distribution in a synchronous system extending over several levels of interconnect (for example between logic blocks within a chip, chips mounted on a printed circuit board and boards of chips across a backplane), a race-free clocking scheme for CMOS VLSI requiring a single clock line is presented. Since the technique is race-free, the clock line may be driven by a sinusoid, thereby avoiding the transmission of the higher frequency components associated with fast clock edges. In this way, clock signal distortion due to transmission line effects will be kept to a minimum.