Eliminating Synchronization Latency Using Sequenced Latching
Ghaith Tarawneh, Alex Yakovlev, Terrence Mak · IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems · 2013
Modern multicore systems have a large number of components operating in different clock domains and communicating through asynchronous interfaces. These interfaces use synchronizer circuits, which guard against metastability failures but introduce latency in processing the asynchronous input. We propose a speculative method that hides synchronization latency by overlapping it with computation cycles. We verify the correctness of our approach through a field programmable gate array implementation and apply it to a number of synthesized benchmarks. Synthesis results reveal that our approach achieves average savings of 135% and 204% in area costs and nearly 100% in power costs compared to two similar speculative techniques