Toward Efficient Asynchronous Circuits Design Flow Using Backward Delay Propagation Constraint

In recent years, asynchronous circuits have gained attention in neural network chips and Internet of Things (IoT) due to their potential advantages of low power and high performance. However, design efficiency of asynchronous circuits remains low and faces challenges in large-scale applications because of the lack of electronic design automation (EDA) support. This article presents a new bundled-data (BD) asynchronous circuits’ design flow using traditional EDA tools, including a new backward delay propagation constraint (BDPC) method. In this method, control paths and data paths are analyzed together in a tightly coupled approach to improve the accuracy of static timing analysis (STA). Compared with other design flows, the proposed design flow and constraint method show significant advantages in aspects of STA accuracy, design efficiency, and design applicability, and solving the congestion issues of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) in a previous work. An asynchronous RISC-V processor was implemented to verify the method, with selective handshake technology to further reduce power. Compared with the synchronous processor, the asynchronous processor achieves a 17.4% power optimization on the TSMC 65-nm process and a 48.3% dynamic power savings on the FPGA while maintaining the same frequency and resource utilization.