Single-track asynchronous pipeline templates using 1-of-N encoding

Abstract

This paper presents a new fast and templatized family of fine-grain asynchronous pipeline stages based on the single-track protocol. No explicit control wires are required outside of the datapath and the data is 1-of-N encoded. With a forward latency of 2 transitions and a cycle time of 6 for most configurations, the new family can run at 1.6 GHz using MOSIS TSMC 0.25 /spl mu/m process. This is significantly faster than all known quasi-delay-insensitive templates and has less timing assumptions than the recently proposed ultra-high-speed GasP bundled-data circuits.