Boosting FMAX of Processor Pipelines using Intentional Memory Clock Skew

FPGAs are increasingly being used to implement many new applications, including pipelined processor designs. Designers often employ memories to communicate and pass data between these pipeline stages. However, one-cycle communication between sender and receiver is often required. To implement this read-immediately-after-write functionality, bypass registers are needed by most FPGA memory blocks. Read and write latencies to these memories and the bypass can limit clock frequencies, or require extra resources to further pipeline the bypass. Instead of further pipelining the bypass, this paper applies clock skew scheduling to memory write and read ports of a simple bypass circuit. We show that the clock skew provides an improved FMAX without requiring the area overhead of the pipelined bypass. Many configurations of pipelined memory systems are implemented, and their speed and area compared to our design. Memory clock skew scheduling yields the best FMAX of all techniques which preserve functionality, an improvement of 61% over the baseline clock speed, and consuming 50% fewer resources than the next best performing technique.