The Amulet chips: Architectural development for asynchronous microprocessors

Abstract

During the 1990s a series of asynchronous microprocessors based on the ARM architecture was developed at the University of Manchester. The objective was to demonstrate that it was feasible to implement a commercial architecture with asynchronous logic and that certain advantages could be gained from a self-timed processor. By carrying these designs through to silicon it was demonstrated that processors, caches and whole systems-on-chip could be built without clocks and could perform competitively with ‘conventional’, synchronous systems.