Synthesis of PCHB-WCHB hybrid quasi-delay insensitive circuits

The increasing cost paid in clocking integrated circuits and combating timing variations forces designers to rethink asynchronous approaches to system realization. Among various techniques, quasi-delay-insensitive (QDI) design is promising due to its very relaxed timing assumption. Its expensive logic overhead, however, often nullifies its promise of performance and power improvements, and remains a major obstacle against its adoption. To overcome this obstacle, this paper proposes an efficient static performance analysis procedure and a synthesis flow for precharged half buffer (PCHB) and weak-conditioned half buffer (WCHB) circuit optimization. Experimental results demonstrate efficient performance analysis and effective area reduction under pipeline cycle time constraints.