Synchronous pipeline with normally transparent pipeline stages

摘要

A synchronous pipeline segment and an integrated circuit (IC) including the segment. The segment includes an input stage, an output stage and at least one intermediate stage. A place holder latch associated with each stage indicates whether valid stage data is in the stage. A local clock buffer provides a local clock gating a corresponding stage. The input and output stages are normally opaque and intermediate stages are normally transparent. Data items pass locally asynchronously between the input and output stages and are separated by opaque gated intermediate stages.