Asynchronism in a joint algorithm-architecture perspective

Even if the design of asynchronous circuits reaches a certain level of maturity, they are still considered as a curiosity. However, some interesting industrial applications have been developed recently by Philips for pagers and by Sharp-Mitsubishi for set-top boxes. In this paper, the operating mode of asynchronous circuits is presented and compared with its synchronous counterpart. The properties and potentials of asynchronous circuits are then described, and it is shown that the asynchronous operating mode associated with a description formalism based on communicating processes is a powerful tool to jointly design algorithms and architectures