A group at Cambridge University also designed and fabricated an asynchronous CPU based on an early ARM a long time ago now. Like the ones mentioned in this article, it behaved very well. It would slow down if they pointed a hot air blower at it.
[0] https://www.ontrack.com/blog/2017/01/10/loud-noise-data-loss... [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-a-loud-noise-brought-a-dat...
Ah! Made my day :D
I've worked in groups that have shipped a few chips with his tools and AFAIK they're still the best out there. That said it's still more work than building a synchronous chip, but the power savings can be huge. Rajit has a bunch of neat chips published on his site [1].
Surprising to me was that some of the design foundation for hardware actually borrows from CS, leveraging concepts like communicating sequential processes to provide more formal ways of designing asynchronous circuits - a cool melding of fields!
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1652900/
It's from the Proceedings of the IEEE special issue on async:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2985481_Special_Iss...
We didn't use any standard tools for the designs described, almost everything was written in the group. I think our experience was that it was less bug-prone than synchronous design (as far as DIGITAL bugs go), but it is harder to ensure that your analog circuits have the expected digital behavior.
From a commercial perspective, I'd imagine finding customers who want the CPU, as-is, off the shelf would be rare. But, making adjustments to the inherently fragile design is going to be expensive and time consuming. Even if the customer has deep pockets they probably won't be willing to wait 1 year for a tape out.
http://inst.cs.berkeley.edu/~cs150/sp09/Lecture/lec29-async....
My point was that clocked design is such an orthodoxy that you can almost not find any information and more specifically methodologies to attack asynchronous H/W design problems.
To use an analogy, the vast majority of electronics is digital these days, because analog is darn hard and digital brings in discipline and guarantees but it doesn't mean the subject of analog electronics isn't explored just because it's hard.
That is, outside of things like SERDES links, which are a tiny dark cabal that holds their secrets close :)
As for research there's plenty. I linked slides from an undergraduate course because you wrote that your background leaned more towards computer science. Finding research in this topic is as easy as doing a search through IEEE.
http://asyncsymposium.org/async/Welcome.html http://www.async.caltech.edu/publications.html
I agree that async design is worth researching, but there is a good reason that undergrad level digital design assumes sync.
The game may change going forward since Dennard scaling is dead. 'deepnotderp probably has some interesting insights on this topic, perhaps he will chime in.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jordi_Cortadella/public...
Here's a RTL-level approach:
https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~scotsmit/uncle_async_12.pdf
Here's one for the hybrid Globally-Asynchronous, Locally-Synchronous model:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/200502...
On low-level details, here's two on asynchronous synthesis:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1327634/
http://orbit.dtu.dk/files/3459606/Behavioral%20Synthesis%20N...
Synthesis and verification together
http://csl.yale.edu/~rajit/ps/invsynth.pdf
And here's a few designs from my collection:
http://vlsi.cornell.edu/~rajit/ps/dram.pdf
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/23n9d4pj
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2c07/66eda008b59750eb1e789f...
Note: That's an earlier one I'm including since older nodes are still available via MOSIS and Europractice. Any patents are probably expired. It got first pass in silicon, too.
And I just randomly found this paper that has an optimization algorithm to reduce the area and latency disadvantages of asynchronous circuits:
When you first learn about H/W design in Verilog or VHDL, it feels like your mind is immediately shoehorned and molded by both the literature and your teachers into thinking synchronously (everything has to be clocked, and signals crossing clock domain boundaries are to be treated like they're some form electronic nitroglycerin).
As a matter of fact, HDL courses often go without so much as a mention of the possibility of asynchronous design, or if they mention it, it's to say something along the lines of "just don't".
It almost feels like designing things asynchronously is a sin to be avoided at all cost.
Even further, the synthesis tools themselves will yell at you when you try to do things asynchronously (probably because many of the optimization that can be done with a clocked design don't work).
Granted: asynchronous design is harder and bug-prone, but - at least to someone like myself with more of a software engineering background - it also feels a lot more natural than being forced into the straight jacket of clocks.
This all leads to the unfortunate situation that while there's been a lot written about how to design with clocks, I haven't come across much literature about asynchronous design methodologies.
If anyone on HN has a a reference on asynchronous hardware design methodologies, I'd love to dive into that.