Oklobdzija V. Digital System Clocking. High-Performance...2003

Textbook in PDF format

Clocking is an important aspect and a centerpiece of digital system design. Not only does it have the highest positive impact on performance and power, but also the highest negative impact on the reliability of an improperly designed system. This is becoming more important, as the clock frequency keeps increasing dramatically as it has been in the last decade. The higher the frequency, the more important are the clock system and clock storage elements, because their effects do not scale proportionally with other features that are benefiting from the rapid technological advances of the past fifty years. In this book we treat synchronous systems, which we assume will continue to progress in this direction. In reality, we do not know how long this progress will continue. Other ways of timing digital systems are possible, but they have not demonstrated sufficient progress to become a mainstream solution. We do not pretend to know what the timing of digital systems will be in the future, but we hope to provide sufficient analysis and possibly set the stage for the new approaches that will evolve