Abstract

Asynchronous design has enjoyed a revival of interest recently, as designers seek to eliminate penalties of traditional synchronous design. In principle, asynchronous methods promise to avoid overhead due to clock skew, worst-case design assumptions and resynchronization of asynchronous external inputs. In practice, however, many asynchronous design methods suffer from a number of problems: unsound algorithms (implementations may have hazards), harsh restrictions on the range of designs that can be handled (single-input changes only), incompatibility with existing design styles and inefficiency in the resulting circuits. This thesis presents a new locally-clocked design method for the synthesis of asynchronous controllers. The method has been automated, is proven correct and produces high-performance implementations which are hazard-free at the gate-level. Implementations allow multiple-input changes and handle a relatively unconstrained class of behaviors (called "burst-mode" specifications). The method produces state-machine implementations with a minimal or near-minimal number of states. Implementations can be easily built in such common VLSI design styles as gate-array, standard cell and full-custom. Realizations typically have the latency of

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