Abstract

Semiconductor technologies bring the possibility of embedding billions of components in a chip, allowing the design of complex integrated circuits. However, such levels of integration are not free and delay uncertainties grow steadily, which is increasingly challenging. Quasi-delay-insensitive (QDI) design promises to cope with such challenges, being less timing constrained than synchronous or bundled-data designs. However, two barriers to its wider adoption are: 1) missing methods to automatically implement QDI circuits and 2) enabling QDI semi-custom design. This paper proposes a new QDI design method that extends the null convention logic (NCL) asynchronous template. Also, it describes an associated semi-custom design flow for the extended template, which uses conventional electronic design automation tools to synthesize QDI circuits down to layout. The method enables using the full power of …

Date

2017

Authors

Matheus T Moreira, Peter A Beerel, Marcos LL Sartori, Ney LV Calazans

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers

Volume

65

Issue

6

Pages

1981-1993

Publisher

IEEE