Odd/even Bus Invert with Two-phase Transfer for Buses with Coupling

The coupling capacitances between on-chip bus lines become dominant in deep-submicron technologies. Coding to reduce the switching activity of the individual lines was enough to reduce power on buses in older technologies, but new coding techniques that reduce the coupling activity between lines are needed for deep-submicron buses. One such coding technique uses the simple observation that coupling capacitances are always charged and discharged by activity on neighboring bus lines, where one line has an odd number and the other has an even number (if bus lines are numbered “in-order”). We thus propose to reduce the coupling activity by independently controlling the odd and even bus lines with two separate lines, the Odd Invert, and Even Invert line, respectively. We obtain significant reductions in power simply by comparing the coupling activity for the four possible cases of the Odd and Even Invert lines (00, 01, 10, 11), and then choosing the value with the smallest coupling activity to transmit on the bus. Even after encoding, the coupling activity for a pair of bus lines is still strongly dependent on the data. In particular the toggling sequences 01→10 and 10→01 result in 4 times more coupling energy dissipation than other coupling events. We thus propose a targeted Two-Phase transfer in order to reduce total power only on the pairs of lines that carry such toggling events