Design of Asynchronous Pipelined Systems

CENG SEMINAR SERIES"Design of Asynchronous Pipelined Systems"Prof. Montek SinghDepartment of Computer ScienceUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillAbstract:In this talk, I will present some of our recent work on several aspects of the design of asynchronous pipelined systems. I will begin with an overview of our asynchronous pipelined circuit styles, focusing especially on Mousetrap, which is a high-speed pipeline style suitable for efficient standard-cell implementations. Mousetrap was chosen for the industrial-strength asynchronous pipelined synthesis flow being developed under the DARPA CLASS program. I will present our recent accomplishments in and experiences with the CLASS synthesis flow. Next I will present a novel approach to "counterflow pipelining," which enables several useful architectural concepts (e.g. preemption, speculation, eager evaluation) to be efficiently implemented in asynchronous pipelined ASICs. The key idea is to send "anti-tokens" opposite to the flow of data in order to preempt computations whose results are deemed to be no longer useful. Unlike existing approaches, our approach is arbiter-free, yet correctly handles all metastability issues. Finally, I will describe a high-level synthesis approach called "loop pipelining," which alleviates performance bottlenecks in iterative specifications. We introduce a novel self-timed ring architecture and a synthesis approach, which allows multiple problem instances to be concurrently computed, thereby obtaining substantial performance improvements (1.3-9.7X).Bio:Montek Singh has been an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill since 2001. He received the PhD degree from Columbia University in 2002, and the BTech degree from IIT Delhi, India. His research interest is in the area of asynchronous circuits and systems. His work has been transfered to industry, including IBM, Boeing, and Handshake Solutions (a Philips subsidiary). He is co-Program Chair for ASYNC 2007. He has received a Best Paper award and a Best Paper Finalist nomination at the ASYNC Symposium, an IBM Faculty Award, and was awarded a contract under the prestigious DARPA CLASS program.Host: Prof. Peter Beerel, Ext. 04481

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Rosine Sarafian