At the conference, International Solid-State Circuits Conference in 2012 Cyclos company , founded in 2006 and specializes in the distribution methods of clock signal to the logic circuits, announced its partnership with AMD. Joint work is aimed at implementing the principle of generating a new clock in the processor architecture Piledriver. The technology was developed and tested on processors ARM, but AMD decided to first implement an innovative approach.
Distribution patterns of clock signals are a chain, which is necessary for the delivery of global reference signal in different parts of the crystal and at the last stage which is responsible for the distribution of local clock signal with respect to load fluctuations. The most common pattern is a tree structure, - tree synchronization (Clock Tree). In this case, the signal is transmitted to the center of the crystal, and then on the balanced path is distributed in the leaf nodes. It is important to note that the layout of crystal engineers to make the interconnection, which propagate signals, so that they have the same length.
An alternative method is a meshwork (Clock Mesh). The network is usually located in the final stage and encompasses the entire crystal, which allows to evenly distribute the clock signal, with no need to balance the length of the conductors and the harmonization of final amplifier delays. In addition, in this case, the crystal can be made emergency changes, but the chip can operate at higher frequencies.
The problem of cross-linking is a high energy consumption in comparison with normal tree synchronization, since the network has a lot of extra interconnects. But this problem was solved by Cyclos engineers, who developed the resonant network (Resonant Clock Mesh).
Circuit is able to store and reuse energy, rather than dissipate it, which is characteristic of normal retinal structure. According to Cyclos, reducing energy consumption is measured by the chip up to 10% with AMD architecture Piledriver initially be designed for operation at frequencies above 4 GHz.
The first processors using the technology of Resonant Clock Mesh is code-named Trinity, and will appear in the next quarter.