10.4 SELF-TIMED CIRCUITS

Instead of synthesizing synchronous circuits, an alternative solution, especially in the case of large circuits, is self-timing. As a matter of fact, the synchronous approach has some pitfalls:

  • It assumes that all clock events happen at the same time over the complete circuit; this is not the case in reality (clock skew).
  • The simultaneous transition of all clock signals might generate noise problems.

    image

    Figure 10.7 Pipelined 128-bit adder.

  • The latency and throughput of the circuit are linked to the worst-case delay of the slowest element instead of the average case.

As a generic example, consider the pipelined circuit of Figure 10.8. To each block, for example number i, are associated a maximum delay tmax(i) and an average one tav(i). The latency and throughput of the circuit of Figure 10.8 are equal to n.Tclk and 1/Tclk, respectively where Tclk > max{tmax(0), tmax(1), …, tmax(n − 1)}, that is,

image

Figure 10.8 Generic pipelined circuit.

image

A self-timed version of the same circuit is shown in Figure 10.9. The control is based on a request/acknowledge handshaking protocol:

  • the Req input of block 0 is raised; if block 0 is free the data is registered (en), and the ...

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