A Delay-Insensitive Bus-Invert Code And Hardware Support For Robust Asynchronous Global Communication

A new class of delay-insensitive (DI) codes, called DI Bus-Invert, is introduced for timing-robust global asynchronous communication. This work builds loosely on an earlier synchronous bus-invert approach for low power by Stan and Burleson, but with significant modifications to ensure that delay-insensitivity is guaranteed. The goal is to minimize the average number of wire transitions per communication (a metric for dynamic power), while maintaining good coding efficiency. Basic implementations of the key supporting hardware blocks (encoder, completion detector, decoder) for the DI bus-invert codes are also presented. Each design was synthesized using the UC Berkeley ABC tool and technology mapped to a 90nm industrial standard cell library. When compared to the most coding-efficient systematic DI code (i.e. Berger) over a range of field sizes from 2 to 14 bits, the DI bus-invert codes had 24.6 to 42.9% fewer wire transitions per transaction, while providing comparable coding efficiency. In comparison to the most coding-efficient non-systematic DI code (i.e. m-of-n), the DI bus-invert code had similar coding efficiency and number of wire transitions per transaction, but with significantly lower hardware overhead.