Asynchronous Digital Circuit Design

As the costs of power and timing become increasingly difficult to manage in traditional synchronous systems, designers are being forced to look at asynchronous alternatives. Based on reworked and expanded papers from the VII Banff Higher Order Workshop, this volume examines asynchronous methods which have been used in large circuit design, ranging from initial formal specification to more standard finite state machine based control models. Written by leading practitioners in the area, the papers cover many aspects of current practice including practical design, silicon compilation, and applications of formal specification. It also includes a state-of-the-art survey of asynchronous hardware design. The resulting volume will be invaluable to anyone interested in designing correct asynchronous circuits which exhibit high performance or low power operation.

With asynchronous circuit design becoming a powerful tool in thedevelopment of new digital systems, circuit designers are expectedto have asynchronous design skills and be able to leverage them toreduce power consumption and increase system speed. This book walksreaders through all of the different methodologies of asynchronouscircuit design, emphasizing practical techniques and real-worldapplications instead of theoretical simulation. The only guide ofits kind, it also features an ftp site complete with supportmaterials. Market: Electrical Engineers, Computer Scientists, DeviceDesigners, and Developers in industry. An Instructor Support FTP site is available from the Wileyeditorial department.

This book introduces a wide range of existing and potential applications for asynchronous circuits, each accompanied with the corresponding circuit design theory, sample circuit implementations, results, and analysis.

Principles of Asynchronous Circuit Design - A Systems Perspective addresses the need for an introductory text on asynchronous circuit design. Part I is an 8-chapter tutorial which addresses the most important issues for the beginner, including how to think about asynchronous systems. Part II is a 4-chapter introduction to Balsa, a freely-available synthesis system for asynchronous circuits which will enable the reader to get hands-on experience of designing high-level asynchronous systems. Part III offers a number of examples of state-of-the-art asynchronous systems to illustrate what can be built using asynchronous techniques. The examples range from a complete commercial smart card chip to complex microprocessors. The objective in writing this book has been to enable industrial designers with a background in conventional (clocked) design to be able to understand asynchronous design sufficiently to assess what it has to offer and whether it might be advantageous in their next design task.

This book is intended for designers with experience in traditional (clocked) circuit design, seeking information about asynchronous circuit design, in order to determine if it would be advantageous to adopt asynchronous methodologies in their next design project. The author introduces a generic approach for implementing a deterministic completion detection scheme for asynchronous bundled data circuits that incorporates a data-dependent computational process, taking advantage of the average-case delay. The author validates the architecture using a barrel shifter, as shifting is the basic operation required by all the processors. The generic architecture proposed in this book for a deterministic completion detection scheme for bundled data circuits will facilitate researchers in considering the asynchronous design style for developing digital circuits.

This book is an introduction to the design of asynchronous circuits. It is an updated and significantly extended version of an eight-chapter tutorial that first appeared as Part I in the book "Principles of asynchronous circuit design -- A systems perspective" edited by Sparsø and Furber (2001); a book that has become a standard reference on the topic. The extensions include improved coverage of data-flow components, a new chapter on two-phase bundled-data circuits, a new chapter on metastability, arbitration, and synchronization, and a new chapter on performance analysis using timed Petri nets. With these extensions, the text now provides a more complete coverage of the topic, and it is now made available as a stand-alone book. The book is a beginner's text and the amount of formal notation is deliberately kept at a minimum, using instead plain English and graphical illustrations to explain the underlying intuition and reasoning behind the concepts and methods covered. The book targets senior undergraduate and graduate students in Electrical and Computer Engineering and industrial designers with a background in conventional (clocked) digital design who wish to gain an understanding of asynchronous circuit design.

This book is dedicated to new mathematical instruments assigned for logical modeling of the memory of digital devices. The case in point is logic-dynamical operation named venjunction and venjunctive function as well as sequention and sequentional function. Venjunction and sequention operate within the framework of sequential logic. In a form of the corresponding equations, they organically fit analytical expressions of Boolean algebra. Thus, a sort of symbiosis is formed using elements of asynchronous sequential logic on the one hand and combinational logic on the other hand. So, asynchronous logic is represented in the form of enhanced Boolean logic. The book contains initial concepts, fundamental definitions, statements, principles and rules needed for theoretical justification of the mathematical apparatus and its validity for asynchronous logic. Asynchronous operators named venjunctor and sequentor are designed for practical implementation. These basic elements are assigned for realizing of memory functions in sequential circuits. Present research work is the final stage of generalization and systematization of all those ideas and investigations, author’s interest to which alternately flashed up and faded over many years and for various reasons until formed “critical mass”, and all findings were arranged definitively as a mathematical basis of a theory appropriately associated under a common theme – asynchronous sequential logic, essentially classified as switching logic, which falls into category of algebraic logics.

In recent years, there has been a great surge of interest in asynchronous circuits, largely through the development of new asynchronous design methodologies. This book provides a comprehensive theory of asynchronous circuits, including modelling, analysis, simulation, specification, verification, and an introduction to their design.