Abstract
As VLSI technology advances, delay variations will become more serious. Delay-insensitive asynchronous dual-rail circuits tolerate any delay variation, but their energy consumption is more than double that of the single-rail circuits because signal transitions occur every cycle in all bits regardless of the input bit pattern. However, in functional units, a significant number of input bits may not change from the previous input in many cases. In such a situation, calculation of these bits is not required. Thus, we propose a method, called unflip-bits control, makes use of the above situation, to reduce energy consumption. We evaluate the energy consumption and performance penalty for the method using HSPICE and the verilog-XL simulator, and compare the method with the conventional dual-rail circuit and a synchronous circuit. Our evaluation results reveal that the proposed asynchronous dual-rail circuit has a 12-60 lower energy consumption compared with a conventional asynchronous dual-rail circuit.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 3519-3528 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences |
Volume | E89-A |
Issue number | 12 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2006 Dec |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Delay variation
- Dual-rail asynchronous circuit
- Functional unit
- Unflip-bit control
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Signal Processing
- Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Applied Mathematics