Design Automation of Real-Life Asynchronous Devices and Systems (Foundations and Trends

by Alexander Taubin, Jordi Cortadella, Luciano Lavagno

The number of gates on a chip is quickly growing toward and beyond the one billion mark. Keeping all the gates running at the beat of a single or a few rationally related clocks is becoming impossible. However, the electronics industry for the most part is still reluctant to adopt asynchronous design due to a common belief that there is a lack of commercial-quality Electronic Design Automation tools for asynchronous circuits. Design Automation of Real-Life Asynchronous Devices and Systems presents design flows that can tackle large designs without significant changes with respect to synchronous design flow. Limiting it self to the four design flows that come closest to this goal it starts by overviewing the most commercially and technically proven, Tangram. The other three flows, Null Convention Logic, de-synchronization and gate-level pipelining, can be considered as asynchronous re-implementations of synchronous specifications. Design Automation of Real-Life Asynchronous Devices and Systems demonstrates the possibility of implementing large legacy synchronous designs in an almost "push button" manner negating the need to re-educate synchronous RTL designers. It is essential reading for designers and researchers in large scale integrated circuit design.

152 pages, Paperback

First published August 10, 2007