A New Perspective of Flexible Clocking Ideology for Driving and Devising Circuits in Emerging Resource-Constrained Applications

Clock is the most important signal in electronic system. In current practice, the dominant clocking style is the fixed-frequency approach. For a given application, the clock signal is only required to work at a few selected frequencies. Moreover, in the process of performing a task, it must not change its frequency. This style has worked well in the past. However, it is preventing information processing efficiency from being raised to next level. Worse yet, the emergence of resource-constrained applications, such as edge computing and IoT, can render this approach unserviceable. In this paper, a new perspective of flexible clocking ideology is advocated. It promotes the use of a clock generator, TAF-DPS, that possesses features of “arbitrary frequency generation” and “instantaneous frequency switching”. Owing to its superior capability in synthesizing waveform, TAF-DPS can handle many signal processing problems in a more elegant manner and serve some special purposes more efficiently. Further, it can be used for generating data for security purposes. TAF-DPS is especially valuable for environments with large frequency instability, which is a major problem in resource-constrained applications. The contribution of this paper is the advocacy of a new perspective of flexible clocking. This ideology is gradually developed in this paper as the argument is carried out through examples of novel architectures enabled by TAF-DPS. The perspective naturally emerges from the collective effect of those novel architectures. The large number of emerging applications, exemplified by edge computing and IoT, inspire system-level innovations that inevitably present new challenges to circuit-level. Those challenges are so demanding that they require overhaul in our circuit design philosophy. This new perspective is such an overhaul in fundamental level. Its aim is to answer the challenges, for better serving the emerging demands in higher levels.