Patents by Inventor Lester Crossman Hall

Lester Crossman Hall has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 6104253
    Abstract: Integrated circuits having cooperative ring oscillator clock circuits therein include a plurality of synchronous and asynchronous active devices on the substrate and a plurality of "cooperative" ring oscillators (CRO) electrically coupled in parallel at respective clock nodes, interspersed on the substrate as a mesh, for example. The ring oscillators, which may have a predetermined number of stages but possibly different size in terms of clock driving capability, are preferably interspersed among the synchronous active devices on the surface of the substrate to provide a "local" clock signal which is constrained in terms of skew and jitter by the presence of the other parallel-connected ring oscillators at other locations on the substrate. Multiple replications of a ring-oscillator containing three serially connected inverters may result in the formation of a two-dimensional hexagonal network of clock nodes of different phases (e.g., .phi..sub.1, .phi..sub.2 and .phi..sub.3).
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 11, 1997
    Date of Patent: August 15, 2000
    Assignee: North Carolina State University
    Inventors: Lester Crossman Hall, S Mark Clements, Wentai Liu, Griff L. Bilbro