Highly pipelined asynchronous FPGAs

ABSTRACT

We present the design of a high-performance, highly pipelined asynchronous FPGA. We describe a very fine-grain pipelined logic block and routing interconnect architecture, and show how asynchronous logic can efficiently take advantage of this large amount of pipelining. Our FPGA, which does not use a clock to sequence computations, automatically self-pipelines" its logic without the designer needing to be explicitly aware of all pipelining details. This property makes our FPGA ideal for throughput-intensive applications and we require minimal place and route support to achieve good performance. Benchmark circuits taken from both the asynchronous and clocked design communities yield throughputs in the neighborhood of 300--400 MHz in a TSMC 0.25m process and 500--700 MHz in a TSMC 0.18m process.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.1 Types and Design Styles
          Subjects: Gate arrays

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.6 LOGIC DESIGN
      B.6.1 Design Styles
          Subjects: Parallel circuits
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.1 Types and Design Styles
          Subjects: VLSI (very large scale integration)

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
asynchronous circuits, concurrency, correctness by construction, pipelining, programmable logic