Operation Dependent Frequency Scaling Using Desynchronization

Nitish Srivastava and Rajit Manohar

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, electro-magnetic interference (EMI), 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.
 
  
Yale