Self-Resetting Latches for Asynchronous Micro-Pipelines

Asynchronous circuits are increasingly attractive as low power or high-performance replacements to synchronous designs. A key part of these circuits are asynchronous micropipelines; unfortunatelly, the existing micropipeline styles either improve performance or decrease power consumption, but not both. Very often, the pipeline register plays a crucial role in these cost metrics. In this paper we introduce a new register design, called self-resetting latches, for asynchronous micropipelines which bridges the gap between fast, but power hungry, latch-based designs and slow, but low power, flip-flop designs. The energy-delay metric for large asynchronous systems implemented with self-resetting latches is, on average, 41% better than latch-based designs and 15% better than flip-flop designs. Categories and Subject Descriptors B.5.1 [Register-Transfer-Level Implementation]: Design General Terms Design,Performance,Measurement Keywords self-resetting latches, micropipelines, asynchronous, lo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Tiberiu Chelcea, Girish Venkataramani, Seth Copen Goldstein
• Keywords: Asynchronous Circuits, DAC 2007, Design Automation, Flip-flop Designs, Large Asynchronous Systems