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Ixiasoft
Visible to Intel only — GUID: mwh1410471284276
Ixiasoft
2.4.2. Pipelining and Retiming
For example, consider a 2-input XOR gate where one input changes from 1 to 0, and moments later the other input changes from 0 to 1. For a short time, both inputs become 1 (high), resulting in 0 (low) at the output of the XOR gate. Then, when the second input transition takes place, the XOR gate output becomes 1 (high). Therefore, before the output becomes stable, the input delay produces a glitch in the output.
A glitch can propagate to subsequent logic and create unnecessary switching activity, increasing power consumption. Circuits with many XOR functions, such as arithmetic circuits or cyclic redundancy check (CRC) circuits, tend to have many glitches if there are several levels of combinational logic between registers.
Registers stop glitches from propagating through combinational paths. Pipelining is a technique that breaks combinational paths by inserting registers. By reducing logic-level numbers between registers, pipelining can result in higher clock speed operations. However, pipelining increases the latency of a circuit in terms of the number of clock cycles to a first result.
The following figure shows how pipelining breaks a long combinational path.
This reduction in switching activity lowers power dissipation in combinational logic. However, for designs with few glitches, pipelining can increase power consumption by adding unnecessary registers. Pipelining can also increase resource utilization.