qBSA: Logic Design of a 32-bit Block-Skewed RSFQ Arithmetic Logic Unit

Single flux quantum (SFQ) circuits are an attractive beyond-CMOS technology because they promise two orders of magnitude lower power at clock frequencies exceeding 25 GHz. However, every SFQ gate is clocked creating very deep gate-level pipelines that are difficult to keep full, particularly for sequences that include data-dependent operations. This paper proposes to increase the throughput of SFQ pipelines by redesigning the datapath to accept and operate on least-significant bits (LSBs) clock cycles earlier than more significant bits. This skewed datapath approach reduces the latency of the LSB side which can be feedback earlier for use in subsequent data-dependent operations increasing their throughput. In particular, we propose to group the bits into 4-bit blocks that are operated on concurrently and create block-skewed datapath units for 32-bit operation. This skewed approach allows a subsequent data-dependent operation to start evaluating as soon as the first 4-bit block completes. Using this general approach, we develop a block-skewed MIPS-compatible 32-bit ALU. Our gate-level Verilog design improves the throughput of 32-bit data dependent operations by 2x and 1.5x compared to previously proposed 4-bit bit-slice and 32-bit Ladner-Fischer ALUs respectively. We have quantified the benefit of this design on instructions per cycle (IPC) for various RISC-V benchmarks assuming a range of non-ALU operation latencies from one to ten cycles. Averaging across benchmarks, our experimental results show that compared to the 32-bit Ladner-Fischer our proposed architecture provides a range of IPC improvements between 1.37x assuming one-cycle non-ALU latency to 1.2x assuming ten-cycle non-ALU latency. Moreover, our average IPC improvements compared to a 32-bit ALU based on the 4-bit bit-slice range from 2.93x to 4x.