ABSTRACT
The clock speed has been rising rapidly, doubling every 3 years as plotted in Figure 12.1. Currently, the highest microprocessor clock frequency is slightly above 3 GHz, while that number is changing rapidly upward. It is expected that we will reach 10 GHz in the next 5 years, and by the year 2010, the processors will be running at frequencies beyond 10 GHz. At that clock rate, several challenges may force us to reexamine standard approaches to clocking.
