Ken Stevens Associate Professor UNIVERSITY OF UTAH ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING DEPT. 50 S CENTRAL CAMPUS DR RM 3280 SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH   84112-9206 Office: Merrill Engineering Building, Rm 4506 Tel.: +801-585-9176     Fax: +801-581-5281 Email: kstevens@ece.utah.edu

Biography

Kenneth S. Stevens received a B.A. degree in Biology and B.S. in Computer Science in 1982, and M.S. in Computer Science in 1984 from the University of Utah. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in 1994. From 1984 through 1991 he held research positions at the Fairchild/Schlumberger Laboratory for AI Research, the Schlumberger Palo Alto Research laboratory, and Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto CA. Dr. Stevens became an Assistant Professor at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) in Dayton OH in 1994, and since 1996 he has been an Adjunct Professor. Since 1996 he has been employed at Intel's Strategic CAD Labs in Hillsboro OR.

Dr. Stevens has been on the technical program committee for various conferences and workshop, such as the International Symposium on Advanced Research in Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC) where he has served since 1998. He has been invited to be a panel member at International Test Conference (ITC) and ASYNC. He was the principal author and developer on three papers that received the Best Paper awards for communication chip architecture, circuit design, and timing analysis. He holds seven patents in the area of communications chip design, circuit design, and timing analysis. He is a Senior Member of IEEE. Ken has fabricated several large fully asynchronous VLSI chips, and has developed public domain software for the international spell checker "ispell". He is also been the co-founder of a successful small software company. His research interests include asynchronous circuits, VLSI, architecture and design, hardware synthesis and verification, and timing analysis.

RAPPID Revolving Asynchronous Pentium® Processor Instruction Decoder

Project Description

The RAPPID chip is an asynchronous Pentium II instruction length decoder and steering unit designed at Intel's Strategic CAD Lab (SCL). The design goal was to research the feasibility of achieving high-performance microprocessor design using asynchronous circuits. The design was fabricated in Intel's 0.35 micron process, with silicon arriving in June of 1998.

The RAPPID core contains 120,000 transistors in an area of 3.0 by 2.4 mm. The entire test chip circuitry (which includes instruction FIFO and pads) contains 220,000 transistors in an area of 3.5 by 3.1 mm. Simulation results show that RAPPID can decode instructions at an average throughput of 3.5 instructions per nS with a latency of 2.1nS, which is about three times better than the performance of an x86 processor running at 400MHz. (This was the frequency of the industry leading products at the time.)

Asynchronous design has some potential benefits in areas like performance, power, and productivity. However, the relative simplicity of traditional clocked circuit design, in addition to lack of expertise and tool support for asynchronous design, has thus prevented its widespread use in microprocessors. Full adoption of asynchronous protocols by microprocessor designers will probably not occur unless they hit a wall that blocks further performance improvement in clocked design. However, circuit designers are already using asynchronous self-timed circuits to overcome the problems posed by very high frequency clocked design. The purpose of the asynchronous design research is to find out how to design without a clock in order to bypass the clocked design wall. This work also focuses on developing methodology and CAD tools to support current and future high-performance self-timed circuit technology.

The following table compares the asynchronous RAPPID chip against a 400MHz processor - the fastest commercial x86 processor at the time silicon was received. The RAPPID results - excluding testability - are measured silicon. While the comparisons are valid, they are not completely apple-to-apple as there are some differences between the commercial processor interfaces and the RAPPID interfaces. However, this is as close a comparison as has been published in academia or industry.

Notes:

Silicon arrived in June 1998. Unfortunately there was an undersized gate which didn't permit the enabling of the length decode cycling from reset. We were able to activate the part after performing a FIB edit. The results were measured on the FIB edited silicon. A second timing bug in the slow clocked PLA did not permit us to run the rare instructions.

Both RAPPID and an Intel processor used for comparison were fabricated in the same line using a 0.35 micron technology.

Performance was measured at nominal Vcc and temperature, while the clocked performance include the T-spec margins. It is not necessary to add the margins to RAPPID because an asynchronous circuit will actually run faster under such circumstances.

Power was measured comparing the integer power test from the P6 power test suite. We calculated the energy per instruction in joules since the frequencies were vastly different between the two parts.

RAPPID's area is compared to the area of the logic performing the equivalent functionality in the clocked circuit. These parts were in the Instruction Fetch and Decode units. There are some microarchitecture differences and requirements, particularly in the steering logic, which affect these results.

We designed a BIST test structure but did not fabricate it. Testability results were calculated by feeding the BIST vectors into RAPPID using the COSMOS fault simulator. The reported results removed intra-gate stuck-at faults according to industry methodology. We additionally removed from consideration faults which were not targeted by the BIST logic (mainly prefix handling logic that accounted for approximately 4% of the circuitry).

Schmoo results

Some performance and power schmoos of the instruction delivery FIFO circuitry on the ultra slow wafer split. The tested circuit show good robustness over voltage. The RAPPID instruction ring FIFO performed at 1.68 GHz at 1.4V. The performance was then measured over a wide range of voltages. The performance scaled linearly with the voltage from 2.5 volts down to 0.5 volts, with performance ranging from 3.37 GHz down to 47 MHz. Under 0.5V - 0.6V, the performance no longer scaled linearly and the part became unreliable.

Power was measured across the operating range for a single low activity data point. The power ranged from 354mW at 2.5V to 55.6mW at 1.4V, 16.2mW at 1.0V and 0.22mW at 0.5V. These power numbers in particular are preliminary because of the sensitivity to data dependencies and activity factors. These numbers show scaling and a single datapoint but are not complete and run on a low activity test.

Following are graphs of measured silicon performance and power results:

Performance of the ultra-slow wafers seem to be very close to the slow split simulations we ran.

Comments are welcome. Please send e-mail to kstevens@ece.utah.edu
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