Design of a clockless MSP430 core using mixed asynchronous design flow

Abstract

There are various limitations on the supporting tools and design methodologies for the implementation of an asynchronous delay-insensitive model. In this paper, we propose a new design flow by exploiting a mixed model, which combines a bounded delay model and a delay-insensitive model. To develop the design flow, we use an asynchronous finite-state machine for the bounded delay model and the null convention logic for the delay-insensitive model. Further, we designed an MSP430 core to verify the proposed design flow and the results of simulation show that it exhibits a performance improvement of 30.34% over its synchronous counterpart.