A VHDL-based design methodology for asynchronous circuits

The asynchronous circuit style is based on micropipelines, a style used to develop asynchronous microprocessors at Manchester University. This paper has presented some engineering work on developing a micropipeline blocksorter. The work presented in this paper demonstrates that VHDL can be used to describe the behaviour of micropipelined systems. It also shows a comparison of 2-phase and 4-phase implementations in transistor count, speed, and energy. Though the nature of the work is mainly engineering, there are some significant new insights gained in the course of the work. In summary, a design environment for asynchronous circuits has been established based upon the micropipeline style and VHDL, a standard hardware description language.

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