Design of an Asynchronous Detector with Priority Encoding Technique

This paper presents an asynchronous detector with priority encoding technique. Conventionally, a normal synchronous detector like an image sensor checks all the outputs of detection cells, whatever the cells are activated or not. Thus, it spends a lot of undesired power consumption. On the contrary, an asynchronous detector to only check the activated cells has a small power consumption, even though it has a low operating speed. In order to improve the data transfer rates, a priority encoding technique is described. A test chip to verify the proposed technique has fabricated with 3.3V 0.18um 1-poly 5-metal CMOS process. The effective chip area is 0.345 mm2 and power consumption is about 8mW. The measured performance shows 65,026 patterns.