Low Design Overhead Timing Error Correction Scheme for Elastic Clock Methodology

Abstract

The elastic clock scheme is a robust design methodology to ensure timing closure under PVT variation using locally generated clocks and handshaking protocol. However, it still has a chance of timing errors due to delay mismatch between the data-path and delay replica. In this paper, we propose a low design overhead timing error correction scheme tailored to elastic clock. In the proposed scheme, a timing error can be corrected within a cycle using clock stretching. The proposed scheme shows 40.3× and 4.6× reduction in timing margin with 9.1% and 9.0% area overhead over the synchronous baseline and elastic clock design, respectively.