Future career in asynchronous design

[cafukarfoo]

Hello,

Nowaday, all company is doing sync design.

Do you happen to know that any company doing async design?

Is that helping yuor career if you do async design?

 

[ubna]

Re: Async Design Future

Async design is faater than sync design.
But there are no products commercially that use async design..

 

[Thinkie]

Async Design Future

There is ARM 996 which is an async ARM...

Async design is a bit of a nightmare... do it only if you really really need it and you are prepared to spend months on PnR , STA....

 

[funzero]

Re: Async Design Future

Some corps as Silistix

form Machester University and Handshake from NXP make async practice. And more , Arm and Handshake have co-developped a clockless arm arm966hs. you can download the datasheet.

 

[sunjimmy]

Async Design Future

As far as i know, the concept behind asynchronous design is even-trigger ckt, one event triggers another event logic, and ........
The advantage and beauty of asynchronous design is that you can achieve the fastest speed for that specific technology node and low-power without clock tree.
Just like Thinkie said "Async design is a bit a nighmare...' due to lack of proper EDA tools to handle it.
But i think that it's very promising in the future. Think about large parallel computing application or some application like neuro computing, asynchronous design should be the best way to achieve performance and low-power requirement.

 

[vikasvij1982]

Re: Async Design Future

Hi,

Async design is good but its not necessarily fast. It depends on the methodology used for generating the asynchronous circuits, like delay insensitive circuit, huffman circuits, muller circuits or time based asynchronous circuits. Each have their pros and cons. There is also research done in pipelines asynchronous circuits and controllers. But in that also there are two groups, one following 2 phase and the other the 4 phase transition model.

So in all the Async group hasn't got a fixed methodology and according to me it is one of the major negatives for it, but if you get the best out of blocks then definitely it gives great performance and power benefits.

As earlier pointed out, EDA tools is one of the major bottlenecks for asyncs early adoption, but tools like ATACS, Petrify, 3D, and many others are proving their worth. I feel that there is a future for async design and it will be adopted step by step, but there wont be any drastic change overnight as none of the big firms who have spent big bucks on Synchronous tools will move to async design that soon .

Vikas
Graduate Student
University Of Utah