Application specific asynchronous microengines for efficient high-level control

technical reportDespite the growing interest in asynchronous circuits programmable asynchronous controllers based on the idea of microprogramming have not been actively pursued Since programmable control is widely used in many commercial ASICs to allow late correction of design errors to easily upgrade product families to meet the time to market and even efficient run time modications to control in adaptive systems we consider it crucial that self timed techniques support efficient programmable control This is especially true given that asynchronous (self-timed) circuits are well suited for realizing reactive and control intensive designs We offer a practical solution to programmable asynchronous control in the form of application-speciffic microprogrammed asynchronous controllers (or microengines). The features of our solution include a modular and easily extensible datapath structure support for two main styles of hand shaking (namely two phase and four phase), and many efficiency measures based on exploiting concurrency between operations and employing efficient circuit structures Our results demonstrate that the proposed microengine can yield high performance-in fact performance close to that offered by automated high level synthesis tools targeting custom hard wired burstmode machines