METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR REMOVING A PIPELINE BUBBLE

One embodiment of the present invention provides a system for augmenting a pipeline with a bubble-removal circuit. During operation, the system generates a bubble-removal circuit which determines a clock-enable signal based at least on whether an upstream register has valid data and whether the pipeline is stalled. Next, the system gates the clock signal using the clock-enable signal. The augmented pipeline can determine whether a first register contains invalid data, which is associated with a bubble. Next, the augmented pipeline determines whether a second register contains valid data, wherein the second register is adjacent to and upstream from the first register. If the first register contains invalid data and the second register contains valid data, the augmented pipeline replaces the invalid data of the first register with valid data based on the valid data in the second register without propagating the invalid data to a downstream register.