High-speed non-linear asynchronous pipelines

Abstract

Many approaches recently proposed for high-speed asynchronous pipelines are applicable only to linear datapaths. However, real systems typically have non-linearities in their datapaths, i.e. stages may have multiple inputs ('joins') or multiple outputs ('forks'). This paper presents several new pipeline templates that extend existing high-speed approaches for linear dynamic logic pipelines, by providing efficient control structures that can accommodate forks and joins. In addition, constructs for conditional computation are also introduced. Timing analysis and SPICE simulations show that the performance overhead of these extensions is fairly low (5% to 20%).