Test Oriented Design and Layout Generation of an Asynchronous Controller for the Blade Template

Blade is a bundled-data asynchronous template to cope with process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variability. Its timing resilient behavior enables to extend the propagation delay of certain pipeline stages when a timing violation is detected. Despite the recent improvements in the template controller design, the new approaches focus mostly on performance, but the testability of these controllers is not addressed. This paper presents a test oriented Click-based controller for the Blade template, which is compatible with commercial EDAs. The results show that the proposed functional testing approach presents, without the need of scan cells, 100% of fault coverage for stuck-at faults in the controller. In addition to the full testability, the proposed controller also presents gains of 80% in throughput at the cost of 10% in silicon area and 6% in energy.