Hybrid Synchronous-Asynchronous Tool Flow for Emerging VLSI Design

In the era of high-speed and low-power VLSI circuits, the question of which circuit family is best for a given application has become extremely relevant. From a designer’s perspective, technology miniaturization brings increased parameter variation and decreased reliability, which lead to circuit malfunction. To mitigate the risks of undesirable circuit behavior, a designer has to make decisions not only at the micro-architectural scale, but also at the transistor-level scale. Various emerging technologies and non-conventional circuit families may help alleviate reliability problems and provide better performance. We have developed automated tools that allow designers to select the circuit family that yields the best results in terms of various design metrics for any application. Using our tools and techniques, the circuit choices can be made in a timely manner without in-depth knowledge of every circuit family under consideration. We demonstrate a tool flow that offers significant reduction in the design cycle time. We provide synchronous and asynchronous circuit libraries for designers to evaluate their circuit architectures and explain how this work can be extended to arbitrary types of circuit families for any given technology node. Finally, we evaluate the novel tools using ITC99 benchmark suite and present simulation results for various circuit implementations in terms of throughput, power, process corners, and input statistics.