Current Sensing Completion Detection in Single-Rail Asynchronous Systems

In this article, an alternative approach to detecting the computation completion of combinatorial blocks in asynchronous digital systems is presented. The proposed methodology is based on well-known phenomenon that occurs in digital systems fabricated in CMOS technology. Such logic circuits exhibit significantly higher current consumption during the signal transitions than in the idle state. Duration of these current peaks correlates very well with the actual computation time of the combinatorial block. Hence, this fact can be exploited for separation of the computation activity from static state. The paper presents fundamental background of addressed alternative completion detection and its implementation in single-rail encoded asynchronous systems, the proposed current sensing circuitry, achieved simulation results as well as the comparison to the state-of-the-art methods of completion detection. The presented method promises the enhancement of the performance of an asynchronous circuit, and under certain circumstances it also reduces the silicon area requirements of the completion detection block

Exploration and Design of High Performance Variation Tolerant On-Chip Interconnects

Siirretty Doriast

DPA on quasi delay insensitive asynchronous circuits: formalization and improvement

The purpose of this paper is to formally specify a flow devoted to the design of Differential Power Analysis (DPA) resistant QDI asynchronous circuits. The paper first proposes a formal modeling of the electrical signature of QDI asynchronous circuits. The DPA is then applied to the formal model in order to identify the source of leakage of this type of circuits. Finally, a complete design flow is specified to minimize the information leakage. The relevancy and efficiency of the approach is demonstrated using the design of an AES crypto-processor.Comment: Submitted on behalf of EDAA (http://www.edaa.com/

Practical advances in asynchronous design

Journal ArticleRecent practical advances in asynchronous circuit and system design have resulted in renewed interest by circuit designers. Asynchronous systems are being viewed as in increasingly viable alternative to globally synchronous system organization. This tutorial will present the current state of the art in asynchronous circuit and system design in three different areas. The first section details asynchronous control systems. The second describes a variety of approaches to asynchronous datapaths. The third section is on asynchronous and self-timed circuits applied to the design of general purpose processors

Towards Logic Functions as the Device using Spin Wave Functions Nanofabric

As CMOS technology scaling is fast approaching its fundamental limits, several new nano-electronic devices have been proposed as possible alternatives to MOSFETs. Research on emerging devices mainly focusses on improving the intrinsic characteristics of these single devices keeping the overall integration approach fairly conventional. However, due to high logic complexity and wiring requirements, the overall system-level power, performance and area do not scale proportional to that of individual devices. Thereby, we propose a fundamental shift in mindset, to make the devices themselves more functional than simple switches. Our goal in this thesis is to develop a new nanoscale fabric paradigm that enables realization of arbitrary logic functions (with high fan-in/fan-out) more efficiently. We leverage on non-equilibrium spin wave physical phenomenon and wave interference to realize these elementary functions called Spin Wave Functions (SPWFs). In the proposed fabric, computation is based on the principle of wave superposition. Information is encoded both in the phase and amplitude of spin waves; thereby providing an opportunity for compressed data representation. Moreover, spin wave propagation does not involve any physical movement of charge particles. This provides a fundamental advantage over conventional charge based electronics and opens new horizons for novel nano-scale architectures. We show several variants of the SPWFs based on topology, signal weights, control inputs and wave frequencies. SPWF based designs of arithmetic circuits like adders and parallel counters are presented. Our efforts towards developing new architectures using SPWFs places strong emphasis on integrated fabric-circuit exploration methodology. With different topologies and circuit styles we have explored how capabilities at individual fabric components level can affect design and vice versa. Our estimates on benefits vs. 45nm CMOS implementation show that, for a 1-bit adder, up to 40x reduction in area and 228x reduction in power is possible. For the 2-bit adder, results show that up to 33x area reduction and 222x reduction in power may be possible. Building large scale SPWF-based systems, requires mechanisms for synchronization and data streaming. In this thesis, we present data streaming approaches based on Asynchronous SPWFs (A-SPWFs). As an example, a 32-bit Carry Completion Sensing Adder (CCSA) is shown based on the A-SPWF approach with preliminary power, performance and area evaluations

Design techniques for high performance asynchronous arithmetic operators

High performance asynchronous arithmetic operator design techniques are proposed, which adopt some of the techniques commonly used in synchronous systems such as fast precharged logic and efficient latch design, while maintaining the features of localized and elastic pipelining control inherent in asynchronous design. A pipelined sixteen bit multiplier designed using these techniques is presented and its performance compared with several previously reported asynchronous and synchronous designs

Stochastic-Based Computing with Emerging Spin-Based Device Technologies

In this dissertation, analog and emerging device physics is explored to provide a technology platform to design new bio-inspired system and novel architecture. With CMOS approaching the nano-scaling, their physics limits in feature size. Therefore, their physical device characteristics will pose severe challenges to constructing robust digital circuitry. Unlike transistor defects due to fabrication imperfection, quantum-related switching uncertainties will seriously increase their susceptibility to noise, thus rendering the traditional thinking and logic design techniques inadequate. Therefore, the trend of current research objectives is to create a non-Boolean high-level computational model and map it directly to the unique operational properties of new, power efficient, nanoscale devices. The focus of this research is based on two-fold: 1) Investigation of the physical hysteresis switching behaviors of domain wall device. We analyze phenomenon of domain wall device and identify hysteresis behavior with current range. We proposed the Domain-Wall-Motion-based (DWM) NCL circuit that achieves approximately 30x and 8x improvements in energy efficiency and chip layout area, respectively, over its equivalent CMOS design, while maintaining similar delay performance for a one bit full adder. 2) Investigation of the physical stochastic switching behaviors of Mag- netic Tunnel Junction (MTJ) device. With analyzing of stochastic switching behaviors of MTJ, we proposed an innovative stochastic-based architecture for implementing artificial neural network (S-ANN) with both magnetic tunneling junction (MTJ) and domain wall motion (DWM) devices, which enables efficient computing at an ultra-low voltage. For a well-known pattern recognition task, our mixed-model HSPICE simulation results have shown that a 34-neuron S-ANN implementation, when compared with its deterministic-based ANN counterparts implemented with digital and analog CMOS circuits, achieves more than 1.5 ~ 2 orders of magnitude lower energy consumption and 2 ~ 2.5 orders of magnitude less hidden layer chip area

Average-case optimized technology mapping of one-hot domino circuits*

Journal ArticleThis paper presents a technology mapping technique for optimizing the average-case delay of asynchronous combinational circuits implemented using domino logic and one-hot encoded outputs. The technique minimizes the critical path for common input patterns at the possible expense of making less common critical paths longer. To demonstrate the application of this technique, we present a case study of a combinational length decoding block, an integral component of an Asynchronous Instruction Length Decoder (AILD) which can be used in PentiumR processors. The experimental results demonstrate that the average-case delay of our mapped circuits can be dramatically lower than the worst-case delay of the circuits obtained using conventional worst-case mapping techniques

Asynchronous techniques for new generation variation-tolerant FPGA

PhD ThesisThis thesis presents a practical scenario for asynchronous logic implementation that would benefit the modern Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) technology in improving reliability. A method based on Asynchronously-Assisted Logic (AAL) blocks is proposed here in order to provide the right degree of variation tolerance, preserve as much of the traditional FPGAs structure as possible, and make use of asynchrony only when necessary or beneficial for functionality. The newly proposed AAL introduces extra underlying hard-blocks that support asynchronous interaction only when needed and at minimum overhead. This has the potential to avoid the obstacles to the progress of asynchronous designs, particularly in terms of area and power overheads. The proposed approach provides a solution that is complementary to existing variation tolerance techniques such as the late-binding technique, but improves the reliability of the system as well as reducing the design’s margin headroom when implemented on programmable logic devices (PLDs) or FPGAs. The proposed method suggests the deployment of configurable AAL blocks to reinforce only the variation-critical paths (VCPs) with the help of variation maps, rather than re-mapping and re-routing. The layout level results for this method's worst case increase in the CLB’s overall size only of 6.3%. The proposed strategy retains the structure of the global interconnect resources that occupy the lion’s share of the modern FPGA’s soft fabric, and yet permits the dual-rail iv completion-detection (DR-CD) protocol without the need to globally double the interconnect resources. Simulation results of global and interconnect voltage variations demonstrate the robustness of the method

High-speed completion detection for current sensing on-chip interconnects

A novel completion detection technique for delay insensitive current sensing on-chip interconnects is presented. The scheme is based on sensing currents on the data wires and comparing the sum of these currents to an appropriately set reference. The goal is to solve the performance bottleneck caused by conventional voltage-mode detection methods. With the channel width of 64 bits, the proposed method is 4.65 times faster and takes 36% less area than the voltage-mode scheme. Furthermore, its speed does not degrade when increasing the channel bit width. It is implemented in a 65 nm CMOS technology