• DOI:10.1109/ASPDAC.2007.358055
• Corpus ID: 14219703

Optimization of Robust Asynchronous Circuits by Local Input Completeness Relaxation

@article{Jeong2007OptimizationOR,
  title={Optimization of Robust Asynchronous Circuits by Local Input Completeness Relaxation},
  author={Cheoljoo Jeong and Steven M. Nowick},
  journal={2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference},
  year={2007},
  pages={622-627}
}

• Cheoljoo Jeong, S. Nowick
• Published 23 January 2007
• Computer Science
• 2007 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference

As process, temperature and voltage variations become significant in deep submicron design, timing closure becomes a critical challenge using synchronous CAD flows. One attractive alternative is to use robust asynchronous circuits which gracefully accommodate timing discrepancies. However, these asynchronous circuits typically suffer from high area and latency overhead. In this paper, an optimization algorithm is presented which reduces the area and delay of these circuits by relaxing their overly-restrictive style. The algorithm was implemented and experiments performed on a subset of MCNC circuits. On average, 49.2% of the gates could be implemented in a relaxed manner, 34.9% area improvement was achieved, and 16.1% delay improvement was achieved using a simple heuristic for targeting the critical path in the circuit. This is the first proposed approach that systematically optimizes asynchronous circuits based on the notion of local relaxation while still preserving the circuit's overall timing-robustness.