Operation-Dependent Frequency Scaling Using Desynchronization
Nitish Srivastava, Rajit Manohar · IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems · 2018
Asynchronous circuits are inherently more robust than their synchronous counterparts. Desynchronization is a way to obtain asynchronous circuits from a synchronous specification using standard design tools while improving circuit for variation tolerance, electromagnetic interference, and resulting in similar area, delay, and energy as the synchronous baseline. This paper proposes a novel operation-dependent desynchronization technique, which desynchronizes the circuit and improves performance beyond the limits of synchronous design. We perform a case study of our proposed technique on RISC-V rocket core and show significant improvement in performance with minimal power and area overheads.