Architectural-Level Synthesis of Asynchronous Systems

Abstract

Asynchronous circuit design has the potential to produce circuits superior to those of synchronous circuit design. Current synchronous methods of architectural-level synthesis do not exploit properties inherent to asynchronous circuits. This research describes potential optimizations and techniques that can be applied to the architectural-level design of asynchronous systems. The proposed methods take advantage of asynchronous circuit properties such as data-dependent delays, modularity, and composiblity. The optimization problems of scheduling and allocation are studied. For scheduling, some counterintuitive properties of delays in a system are shown. The design space is studied and several filters to reduce the size of the design space are proposed. To evaluate and test these ideas the CAD tool Mercury was developed and is described in detail. Mercury is unique in that it can take an abstract model of a design, in this case a data ow graph, and from that generate both an optimal structural view of an asynchronous datapath for the design, as well as the necessary behavioral control to operate that datapath. Several case studies are presented utilizing the tool and methods to illustrate the practical aspects of this work.

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