A distributed controller for system level integration

Abstract

Currently large digital systems consist of a control unit and many processing units. Much work has been done in partitioning large processing units (PUs) into multiple PUs. However, there is still a large control unit that must control each of these PUs. This results in long lines from the control unit to the PUs and hence a long clock period. We present a method to break the control unit into many smaller control units (local CUs) so that each of these local CUs can sit on the same chip as the PU that it controls. These local CUs are partitioned in such a fashion that there is a pipelined sequence of execution between them.<>