DSS: Applying asynchronous techniques to architectures exploiting ILP at compile time

Abstract

Embedded application environments require both high performance and low power. Architectures exploiting instruction-level parallelism (ILP) at compile time, such as very long instruction word (VLIW) and transport triggered architecture (TTA), may satisfy the requirements. They can be further enhanced by using asynchronous circuits to significantly reduce power consumption. As such, we are interested in asynchronous processors with architectures exploiting ILP at compile time. However, most of the current asynchronous processors are based on RISC-like architectures. When designing asynchronous VLIW or TTA processors, the distribution of control introduces some serious problems, and errors may occur because of the variable latencies of operations. This paper investigates the asynchronous processor with architecture exploiting ILP at compile time. In order to overcome these problems, we propose a data source selecting (DSS) scheme to guarantee instructions run correctly on asynchronous VLIW and TTA processors. Concretely, an asynchronous pipelined processor based on TTA is designed. The micro-architecture of the proposed asynchronous TTA processor is presented and an asynchronous processor named Tengyue is implemented using 180nm technology. The experimental results, for a range of benchmarks and working modes, show that the implemented asynchronous TTA processor with DSS scheme support runs correctly and power dissipation is reduced to about 43% to 65% of the equivalent synchronous processor.