The Design of an Asynchronous MIPS R3000 microprocessor

Alain J. Martin, Andrew Lines, Rajit Manohar, Mika Nyström, Robert Southworth, Paul Penzes, Uri V. Cummings, and Tak-Kwan Lee

The design of an asynchronous clone of a MIPS R3000 is presented. In 0.6um CMOS, we expect performance close to 280 MIPS for a power consumption of 7 watts. The paper describes the structure of a high-performance asynchronous pipeline, in particular precise exceptions, pipelined caches, arithmetic, and registers, and the circuit techniques developed to achieve high throughput.
 
  
Yale