04 - AAAA : asynchronisme et adéquation algorithme architecture

Even if the design of asynchronous circuits reaches a certain level of maturity, they are still considered as a curiosity . However, some interesting industrial applications have been developed recently by Philips for pagers and by Sharp-Mitsubishi for set-top boxes . In this paper, the operating mode of asynchronous circuits is first presented, and compared with its synchronous counter-part . The properties and potentials of asynchronous circuits are then described as an introduction to the last part of the paper which aims at showing that the asynchronous operating mode associated with a description formalism based on communicating processes is a powerful tool to jointly design algorithms and architectures .