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Clockless
Chips
Clock speeds are now in the gigahertz range and there is not much room for
speedup before physical realities start to complicate things. With
gigahertz clock powering a chip, signals barely have enough time to make
it across the chip before the next clock tick. At this point, speeding up
the clock frequency could become disastrous.
This is
where a chip that is not constricted by clock comes in to action.
Clockless approach, which uses a technique known as asynchronous
logic, differs from conventional computer circuit design in that the
switching on and off of digital circuits is controlled individually by
specific pieces of data rather than by a tyrannical clock that forces all
of the millions of the
circuits on a chip to march in unison.
A major hindrance to the development of the clockless chips is the
competitiveness of the computer industry. Presently, it is nearly
impossible for companies to develop and manufacture a Clockless chip while
keeping the cost reasonable. Another problem is that there aren’t much
tools used to develop asynchronous chips. Until this is possible,
Clockless chips will not be a major player in the market.
In this seminar the topics covered are – general concept of
asynchronous circuits, their design issues and types of design. The major
designs discussed are Bounded delay method, Delay insensitive method &
the Null Conventional Logic (NCL).
The
seminar also does a comparison of synchronous and asynchronous circuits
and the applications in which asynchronous circuits are used.
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