A Brief Comparison of Two-phase and NOR-based Four-phase Pipelined Asynchronous Systems

Two-phase micro-pipeline asynchronous modules show faster performance than common four-phase control systems, but the conventional systems with multi-port mod-ules normally suffer from long signal paths on stacked C-elements. NOR-based control schemes provide an alternative solution to problems such as propagation delay. This pa-per compares modified versions of these two popular pipelined systems. HSPICE simu-lation results show the two-phase pipelined system is still a reliable solution with a lim-ited number of inputs even when the theoretically lower control overhead is disregarded. A power reduction of over 27% and a propagation improvement of more than 11% were achieved by replacing some decision circuits with modified C-elements.

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