Amos Ben-Meir

Circuit techniques in a 266-MHz MMX-enabled processor

The AMD-K6 MMX-enabled processor is plug-compatible with the industry-standard Socket 7 and is binary compatible with the existing base of legacy X86 software. The microarchitecture is based on an out-of-order, superscalar execution engine using speculative execution. High performance and compact die size are achieved by using self-resetting, self-timed and pulsed-latch circuit design techniques in custom blocks and placed-and-routed blocks of standard cells. The 162 sq. mm die is fabricated on a 0.35-/spl mu/m, five-layer metal process with local interconnect. It is assembled into a ceramic pin grid array (PGA) using C4 flip-chip mounting. The processor functions at clock speeds up to 266 MHz.