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Asynchronous computing

Ex-User (9086)

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What do you think of the idea that clockless circuits have greater potential?
Can you see asynchronous design applied widely in the future?

Synchronous processors are the mainstream, they are easier to design, simple to iterate into large solutions, as cheap as NAND, as slow as their highest propagation delay.

Async have adaptive scaling of speed/power vars, can work with non-ideal/identical components, more potential speed, less power per operation.
On the other hand, largely unexplored and thus not directly comparable.
 

Architect

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Computing presently is asynchronous messages on a synchronous system. It is asynchronous even at the microprocessor level as the CPU randomly gets instructions and reorders them in an attempt to avoid cache misses and such.

I'm not sure how a clock less circuit would work, how would the various IC's communicate? Further I'm not sure that would be an advantage, but then I'm not a hardware expert.
 

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IC's use pipelines, they input one to another as soon as the other finished its share and new inputs are ready. This is similar to thinking that they are clocked between each other and not in relation to every other element.

The advantage appears when output is specified with data obtained at that particular moment, meaning, there is no need to wait for other values to compute as they won't impact the result.
Also when the circuit is not computing, it is not switching, as opposed to constant switching of clocked circuits.
It can also operate in bursts, you increase power or decrease temperature and obtain results faster, instead of adjusting the clock and obtaining fastest result in relation to the most retarded one.

The problem in design is how to control your output when every internal state is racing to be the first one and may be ahead of the intended values.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nowick/nowick-singh-ieee-dt-11-published.pdf
 
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