A Study of Multi-core Processor Design with Asynchronous Interconnect Using Synchronous Design Tools

抄録

This paper presents a study of GALS (Globally-Asynchronous Locally-Synchronous) architecture multi-core processor design with asynchronous interconnects. While GALS is expected to reduce more power dissipation, it has not been the mainstream of LSI design yet, since there have been no mature design tools for asynchronous circuit design. For GALS design, we constructed a design flow based on general synchronous design tools, by specification of design constraints and configurations. Applying the design flow to an experimental multi-core processor GALS design including an asynchronous interconnect based on QDI (Quasi Delay Insensitive) model, we successfully obtained a netlist and layout, and proved that the flow works correctly, by netlist simulation with delay information back-annotated from the layout. Experimental results show the area, power and throughput of the asynchronous interconnect to indicate the impact by introducing GALS architecture instead of globally synchronous design.