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Open Access

Investigation of Asynchronous Pipeline Circuits Based on Bundled-Data Encoding: Implementation Styles, Behavioral Modeling, and Timing Analysis

School of Information Science and Technology, Hainan Normal University, Haikou 571158, China
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Abstract

As VLSI technology enters the post-Moore era, there has been an increasing interest in asynchronous design because of its potential advantages in power consumption, electromagnetic emission, and automatic speed scaling capacity under supply voltage variations. In most practical asynchronous circuits, a pipeline forms the micro-architecture backbone, and its characteristics play a vital role in determining the overall circuit performance. In this paper, we investigate a series of typical asynchronous pipeline circuits based on bundled-data encoding, spanning different handshake signaling protocols such as 2-phase (micropipeline, Mousetrap, and Click), 4-phase (simple, semi-decoupled, and fully-decoupled), and single-track (GasP). An in-depth review of each selected circuit is conducted regarding the handshaking and data latching mechanisms behind the circuit implementations, as well as the analysis of its performance and timing constraints based on formal behavior models. Overall, this paper aims at providing a survey of asynchronous bundled-data pipeline circuits, and it will be a reference for designers interested in experimenting with asynchronous circuits.

Keywords

asynchronous pipeline circuitsbundled-data encodingasynchronous circuit modeling

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Tsinghua Science and Technology
Volume 27 Issue 3,
June 2022
Pages 559-580
DOI: 10.26599/TST.2021.9010089
Cite this article:
Zhou Y. Investigation of Asynchronous Pipeline Circuits Based on Bundled-Data Encoding: Implementation Styles, Behavioral Modeling, and Timing Analysis. Tsinghua Science and Technology, 2022, 27(3): 559-580. https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2021.9010089

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Received: 19 March 2021
Revised: 30 June 2021
Accepted: 07 July 2021
Published: 13 November 2021
© The author(s) 2022

The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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