Is There Any Hope For Asynchronous Design?


In an era when power has become a fundamental design constraint, questions persist about whether asynchronous logic has a role to play. It is a design style said to have significant benefits and yet has never resulted in more than a few experiments. Synchronous design utilizes a clock, where the clock frequency is set by the longest and slowest path in the design. That includes potential var... » read more

Shallow Clock Tree Pre-Estimation for Designing Clock Tree Synthesizable Verilog RTLs (Kyungpook National University)


A technical paper titled “Shallow Clock Tree Pre-Estimation for Designing Clock Tree Synthesizable Verilog RTLs” was published by researchers at Kyungpook National University. Abstract: "Clock tree synthesis (CTS) is an important process in determining overall chip timing and power consumption. The CTS is also a time-consuming process for checking the clock tree. If the chip design and sp... » read more

Clocks Getting Skewed Up


At a logical level, synchronous designs are very simple and the clock just happens. But the clocking network is possibly the most complex in a chip, and it's fraught with the most problems at the physical level. To some, the clock is the AC power supply of the chip. To others, it is an analog network almost beyond analysis. Ironically, there are no languages to describe clocking, few tools t... » read more