STARI: A Technique for High-Bandwidth Communication (Thesis)
Report ID: TR-394-92Author: Greenstreet, Mark R.
Date: 1993-01-00
Pages: 165
Download Formats: |Postscript|
Abstract:
This dissertation presents a novel technique for high--bandwidth communication called STARI, {em Self--Timed At Receiver's Input}. STARI is a hybrid of synchronous and self--timed design techniques. STARI is provably correct, well suited for CMOS implementation, and offers a practical, cost effective approach to interprocessor communication in a multiprocessor. To demonstrate STARI, a CMOS chip has been implemented and is described here. STARI is motivated by limitations of purely synchronous or purely self--timed hardware. This dissertation begins with an asymptotic analysis of the performance of self--timed pipelines. It is shown that self--timed pipelines can achieve linear speedup under an assumption of uniform interconnect delays. However, practical designs have non--uniform interconnect because of the hierarchy of packaging. In these designs, the performance is limited by the latency of the slowest interconnect. To exploit the high--bandwidth offered by STARI in a multiprocessor, each processor node must have a memory system that offers high--bandwidth data transfers to the STARI interface and low latency access to the local CPU. Dual--port memories allow both of these goals to be met. Consistency problems that arise when using dual--port memories are identified and two software solutions are presented and analyzed.