Current-sensing for crossbars

Full crossbars provide a flexible solution to interconnectivity needed to support parallelism in modern FPGAs, VLIW architectures and on-chip, multiprocessors. Unfortunately, the speed and power consumption of these crossbars degrades drastically with increased connectivity. This paper applies current sensing and low swing driving techniques as a means to improve the performance of the full crossbar. Simulation results, using HSPICE for 0.13 /spl mu/m, 1.5 V CMOS technology, show that current-mode sensing is faster than voltage mode counterpart by more than 25%. This gain in the speed increases significantly from 25% to more than 65%, when the capacitive load of the switches of the crossbar increases from 4 fF to 16 fF. The speed of the current mode sensing does not degrade by more than 10%, when the supply voltage of the driver is reduced by 50%.