Asynchronous Circuit Design on Field Programmable Gate Array Devices

Developing a rapid prototyping environment utilizing hardware description languages (HDLs) and conventional FPGAs can help ease and conquer the difficulties caused by the complexity of asynchronous digital systems and the advance of VLSI technology recently. We proposed a design flow and a FPGA template for implementing generalized C-element (gC) style asynchronous controllers. Utilizing conventional FPGA synthesis tools, self-timed bundled-data function modules can be realized with some effort on timing validation. The proposed design flow with FPGA-based realization approach is a very effective design methodology for rapid prototyping and functionality validation. This work could be useful for the early stage of performance estimation, power reduction exploration, circuits design training, and many other applications regarded asynchronous circuits. In this paper, the proposed FPGA-based asynchronous circuit design flow, a hands-on design tutorial, a generalized C-element template, and a list of synthesized benchmark circuits are documented and discussed in detail.