An automated fine-grain pipelining using domino style asynchronous library

Abstract

Register transfer level (RTL) synthesis model which simplified the design of clocked circuits allowed design automation boost and VLSI progress for more than a decade. Shrinking technology and progressive increase in clock frequency are bringing clock to its physical limits. Asynchronous circuits, which are believed to replace globally clocked designs in the future, remain out of the competition due to the design complexity of some automated approaches and poor results of other techniques. Successful asynchronous designs are known but they are primarily custom. This work sketches an automated approach for automatically re-implementing conventional RTL designs as fine-grain pipelined asynchronous quasi-delay-insensitive (QDI) circuits and presents a framework for automated synthesis of such implementations from high-level behavior specifications. Experimental results are presented using our new dynamic asynchronous library.