AMULET1: A Asynchronous ARM Microprocessor

An asynchronous implementation of the ARM microprocessor has been developed using an approach based on Sutherland's Micropipelines. The design allows considerable internal asynchronous concurrency. This paper presents the rationale for the work, the organization of the chip, and the characteristics of the prototype silicon. The design displays unusual properties such as nondeterministic (but bounded) prefetch depth beyond a branch instruction, a data dependent throughput, and employs a novel register locking mechanism. This work demonstrates the feasibility of building complex asynchronous systems and gives an indication of the costs and benefits of the Micropipeline approach.

[1]  Steven M. Burns,et al.  The design of an asynchronous microprocessor , 1989, CARN.

[2]  Emmanuel Katevenis,et al.  Reduced instruction set computer architectures for VLSI , 1984 .

[3]  Ivan E. Sutherland,et al.  Micropipelines , 1989, Commun. ACM.

[4]  Kees van Berkel,et al.  Handshake Circuits: An Asynchronous Architecture for VLSI Programming , 1993 .

[5]  Jim D. Garside,et al.  AMULET1: a micropipelined ARM , 1994, Proceedings of COMPCON '94.

[6]  Jim D. Garside,et al.  A micropipelined ARM , 1993, VLSI.

[7]  Stephen B. Furber,et al.  VLSI Risc Architecture and Organization , 1989 .

[8]  Nigel Charles Paver,et al.  The Design and Implementation of an Asynchronous Microprocessor , 1994 .

[9]  Jim D. Garside,et al.  The design and evaluation of an asynchronous microprocessor , 1994, Proceedings 1994 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design: VLSI in Computers and Processors.

[10]  Burton M. Leary,et al.  A 200 MHz 64 b dual-issue CMOS microprocessor , 1992, 1992 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers.

[11]  T. Tamura,et al.  Self-timed clocking desing for a data-driven microprocessor , 1991 .

[12]  Norman P. Jouppi,et al.  MIPS: a VLSI processor architecture , 1981 .

[13]  Lynn Conway,et al.  Introduction to VLSI systems , 1978 .

[14]  Paul I. Pénzes,et al.  The design of an asynchronous MIPS R3000 microprocessor , 1997, Proceedings Seventeenth Conference on Advanced Research in VLSI.

[15]  Alex Van Someren,et al.  The Arm Risc Chip: A Programmer's Guide , 1994 .

[16]  A. J. Martin.  Formal program transformations for VLSI circuit synthesis , 1989 .

[17]  Jim D. Garside,et al.  Register locking in an asynchronous microprocessor , 1992, Proceedings 1992 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design: VLSI in Computers & Processors.

[18]  Jim D. Garside.  A CMOS VLSI Implementation of an Asynchronous ALU , 1993, Asynchronous Design Methodologies.