Crosstalk-noise-aware bus coding with low-power ground-gated repeaters

Crosstalk noise is one of the serious reliability concerns in nanoscale integrated circuits. Repeater insertion together with shielding wires is a typical method to suppress crosstalk noise associated with global data bus. A new crosstalk-noise-aware bus coding scheme with ground-gated repeaters is proposed in this paper to minimize the routing overhead as well as power consumption of data bus systems. A subset of 4-to-6 crosstalk-noise-aware codes is selected to minimize the number of simultaneous data transitions. The routing overhead is reduced by 12.31% with the new bus coding scheme compared with the conventional data bus with shielding wires. Furthermore, the leakage power and worst-case active power consumptions are reduced by 12.5% and 18.26%, respectively, with the new crosstalk-noise-aware data bus system as compared with the previously published bus coding system in an industrial 40-nm CMOS technology.