Popis: |
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are widely used in prototyping digital circuits. However commercial FPGAs are not very suitable for asynchronous design. Both the architecture of the FPGAs and the synthesis tools are mostly tailored to synchronous design. Therefore potential advantages of the asynchronous circuits could not be observed when they are implemented on commercial FPGAs. This is shown by designing an asynchronous arithmetic logic unit (ALU), implemented in the style of micropipelines, on the Xilinx Virtex XCV300 FPGA family. The hazard characteristics of the target FPGA have been analyzed and a methodology for selftimed asynchronous circuits has been proposed. The design methodology proposes first designing a hazard-free cell set, and then using relationally placed macros (RPMs) to keep the hazard-free behavior, and incremental design technique to combine modules in upper levels without disturbing their timing characteristics. The performance of the asynchronous ALU has been evaluated in terms of the logic slices occupied in the FPGA and data latencies, and a comparison is made with a synchronous ALU designed on the same FPGA. |