Reconvergent clock mesh for on-chip compute cluster

Abstract

A compute cluster includes a compute mesh of interconnected compute elements. A clock mesh includes reconvergent elements, and the reconvergent clock mesh distributes a clock signal to the compute elements. The clock mesh has a topology of nodes connected by branches. Repeaters are located on the branches between nodes. As a result, the reconvergent clock mesh is unidirectional. The repeaters limit the clock signal to forward propagation through the clock mesh and prevent backward propagation through the clock mesh. The clock mesh is reconvergent, in that the clock signal may branch out along different paths from one node and then these paths reconverge at a later node.