Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 08:31:13 -0700
From: Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org>
On 3/23/10 4:09 AM, Julian Skidmore wrote:
Alexey Toptygin wrote:
What's wrong with pulse or async logic
designs? I personally find them
fascinating, but I've never gotten to play with an implementation of
one... Are there problems with designing like this that made people
switch
to sync designs? Anyone know of any good books on non-synchronous logic
design?
Probably the best resources are the Amulet resources from Manchester
University.
Or the work on logical effort by Ivan Sutherland.
I did some contract design work for a company called Theseus (Mumble) back
around 2000. Their stuff was all non-clocked logic. They used two rails
per bit and depending on how the two rails were coded it represented
either 0, 1 or ready (or finished?), if I remember correctly.
The logic to signal back the completion and readys about doubled the
amount of real estate the logic used, but it could run as fast as the
gates allowed, did not have a synchronizing pulse, making remote
monitoring attacks difficult to impossible and only used as much power as
it needed to process the actual data available.
The amount of design discipline needed was substantial, making me wonder
if just going to the trouble of implementing more traditional power saving
techniques wasn't a better option.
Jeff Walther