Fast controllers for data dominated applications

Abstract

A target structure for implementing fast edge-triggered control units is presented. In many cases, the proposed controller is faster than a one-hot encoded structure as its correct timing does not require master-slave flip-flops even in the presence of unpredictable clocking skews. A synthesis procedure is proposed which leads to a performance improvement of 40% on average for the standard benchmark set whereas the additional area is less than 25% compared with conventional finite state machine (FSM) synthesis. The proposed approach is compatible with the state-of-the-art methods for FSM decomposition, state encoding and logic synthesis.