Can asynchronous techniques help the SoC designer?

Abstract

As technological advances make it possible to integrate an entire system on a single die, the designer of a system-on-chip (SoC) is confronted with increasing difficulties concerning complexity, reliability, energy and power consumption, and clock distribution. All those issues are aggravated by increasing parameters variability as a result of the same technological advances. This paper argues that because of the quasi-independence of asynchronous (QDI) circuits of timing, asynchronous logic alleviates the problems posed by parameter variability, and eliminates the clock distribution problem altogether. Furthermore, as some researchers attempt to turn the liability into an asset by exploiting parameter variability to design truly probabilistic computation, the flexibility and time-independence of asynchronous logic could be a natural match.