Design of Asynchronous Circuits Using Synchronous CAD Tools

  • Authors:
  • Alex Kondratyev;Kelvin Lwin

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Design & Test
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Poor CAD support hinders wide acceptance of asynchronous methodologies, and asynchronousdesign tools are far behind synchronous commercial tools. A new design flow, NCL_X, based entirely on commercial CAD tools, targets a subclass of asynchronous circuits called null convention logic. NCL_X shows significant area improvement over other flows for this subclass.EDA FLOWS are industry driven and thus use synchronous methodologies as de facto standards. However implementation problems arise from imposing a synchronous model of operation on deep-submicron circuits. This problem motivates the investigation of other asynchronous modes of operation. Acceptance of new design methodologies including asynchronous ones engineering and industrial communities depends on three major issues:added value of the methodology in terms ofareapowerspeedelectromagnetic interference (EMI) noise immunityand so on; tradeoffs whichdesignparametersoften worsen to achieve added valuessuch as speed versus power and area versusEMI; and the cost of switching to the new methodology including training time development of new libraries and time spent dealing with CAD tool immaturity.