Self: Specification and design of synchronous elastic circuits

Abstract — A simple protocol for latency-insensitive design is presented. The main features of the protocol are the efficient implementation of elastic communication channels and the automatable design methodology. A latch-based implementation with no storage overhead is also proposed. With this approach, fine-granularity elasticity can be introduced at the level of functional units (e.g. ALUs, memories). A formal specification of the protocol is defined and several schemes for the implementation of elasticity are discussed. The opportunities that this protocol opens for microarchitectural design are illustrated with several examples. I