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STARI: A Technique for High-Bandwidth Communication (Thesis)

Report ID:
TR-394-92
Date:
December 1992
Pages:
165
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Abstract:

This dissertation presents a novel technique for high--bandwidth
communication called STARI, {em Self--Timed At Receiver's Input}.
STARI is a hybrid of synchronous and self--timed design techniques.
STARI is provably correct, well suited for CMOS implementation, and
offers a practical, cost effective approach to interprocessor
communication in a multiprocessor. To demonstrate STARI, a CMOS chip
has been implemented and is described here.
STARI is motivated by limitations of purely synchronous or purely
self--timed hardware. This dissertation begins with an asymptotic
analysis of the performance of self--timed pipelines. It is shown
that self--timed pipelines can achieve linear speedup under an
assumption of uniform interconnect delays. However, practical designs
have non--uniform interconnect because of the hierarchy of packaging.
In these designs, the performance is limited by the latency of the
slowest interconnect.
To exploit the high--bandwidth offered by STARI in a multiprocessor,
each processor node must have a memory system that offers
high--bandwidth data transfers to the STARI interface and low latency
access to the local CPU. Dual--port memories allow both of these
goals to be met. Consistency problems that arise when using
dual--port memories are identified and two software solutions are
presented and analyzed.

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