By Peter Clarke 2/21/2012

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has achieved the first commercial implementation of resonant clock mesh technology licensed from startup company Cyclos Semiconductor Inc. Cyclos said that the AMD has used the power-saving clock distribution technology in x86-compatible processor cores destined for inclusion in Opteron server processors and client Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). Cyclos engaged with processor technology licensor ARM Holdings plc in the early years of its existence driving an expectation that an ARM processor core would be the first commercial demonstration of the technology. However it is AMD's Piledriver 64-bit core, which operates at up to and in excess of 4-GHz clock frequency, that represents the first volume production-enabled implementation of resonant clock mesh technology, Cyclos said. Piledriver, fabricated in a 32-nm CMOS process, employs the resonant clocking to reduce clock distribution power by up to 24 percent, while maintaining previous clock-skew targets, Cylos said. The Cyclos resonant clock mesh technology employs on-chip inductors arranged to interact with the large capacitance of the clock signal distribution network to form an oscillating "tank circuit." The result is that Cyclos inductors and clock control circuits "recycle" the clock power instead of dissipating it on every clock cycle as conventional clock tree implementations do. The result is a reduction in total IC power consumption of up to 10 percent, Cyclos said.

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