New asynchronous protocols for enhancing area and throughput in bundled-data pipelines

This paper presents two new area-reduced controllers for bundled-data asynchronous pipelines in which the stages have long critical paths. The proposed protocols allow to reduce the number of required delay elements by using the falling edge of the asynchronous request to indicate data validity. For critical path lengths of 25 gates, the first presented scheme decreases the controller area by 48% and slightly increases the maximum throughput (2%) in comparison to a standard micropipeline implementation. The other more-concurrent scheme proposition leads to a 25% area reduction and a 40% improvement of the maximum pipeline throughput.