High-throughput asynchronous pipelines for fine-grain dynamic datapaths

Abstract

This paper introduces several new asynchronous pipeline designs which offer high throughput as well as low latency. The designs target dynamic datapaths, both dual-rail as well as single-rail. The new pipelines are latch-free and therefore are particularly well-suited for fine-grain pipelining, i.e., where each pipeline stage is only a single gate deep. The pipelines employ new control structures and protocols aimed at reducing the handshaking delay, the principal impediment to achieving high throughput in asynchronous pipelines. As a test vehicle, a 4-bit FIFO was designed using 0.6 micron technology. The results of careful HSPICE simulations of the FIFO designs are very encouraging. The dual-rail designs deliver a throughput of up to 860 million data items per second. This performance represents an improvement by a factor of 2 over a widely-used comparable approach by T.E. Williams (1991). The new single-rail designs deliver a throughput of up to 1208 million data items per second.

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

• http://www.cs.unc.edu/~montek/pubs/singh-nowick-async2000.pdf

• http://www.cs.unc.edu/~montek/pubs/singh-nowick-async2000.pdf,

https://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/async/async2000.html#SinghN00,

https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/2141718959

• http://xplorestaging.ieee.org/ielx5/6759/18072/00837017.pdf?arnumber=837017,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/async.2000.837017