Current Trends in High-Level Synthesis of Asynchronous Circuits

This paper is a survey paper presenting what the author sees as two major and promising trends in the current research in CAD-tools and design-methods for asynchronous circuits. One branch of research builds on top of existing asynchronous CAD-tools that perform syntax directed translation, e.g. the Haste/TiDE tool from Handshake Solutions or the Balsa tool from the University of Manchester. The aims are to add highlevel synthesis capabilities to these tools and to extend the tools such that a wider range of (higher speed) micro-architectures can be generated. Another branch of research takes a conventional synchronous circuit as the starting point, and then adds some form of handshake-based flow-control. One approach keeps the global clock and implements discrete-time asynchronous operation. Another approach substitutes the clocked registers by asynchronous handshake-registers, thus creating truly continuous time asynchronous circuits that operate without a clock. The perspective here is that the substitution/conversion is done as the final step in an otherwise conventional synchronous design flow.