Maelstrom: A Logic Synthesis Technique for Asynchronous Circuits

Area of Science:

• Computer Engineering
• VLSI Design
• Digital Circuits

Background:

• Asynchronous circuit design presents challenges in synthesis and performance optimization.
• Existing methods for synthesizing Computation Hardware Programs (CHP) into asynchronous circuits have limitations in efficiency and scope.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce Maelstrom, a novel synthesis method and open-source tool for generating asynchronous circuits from CHP programs.
• Achieve significant improvements in energy, delay, and area compared to state-of-the-art asynchronous synthesis techniques.

Main Methods:

• Developed a new synthesis methodology for CHP programs.
• Created an open-source tool named Maelstrom to implement the synthesis method.
• Ensured circuit family agnosticism and support for diverse datapath implementations and communication protocols.

Main Results:

• Maelstrom produces asynchronous circuits with significant improvements in energy, delay, and area over existing methods.
• Pre-layout SPICE simulations in a 65nm node confirm substantial performance benefits.
• Successfully synthesized and fabricated a chip from an abstract high-level functional description using Maelstrom.

Conclusions:

• Maelstrom offers a qualitative improvement in logic synthesis for asynchronous circuits from behavioral descriptions.
• The tool and method advance the state-of-the-art in asynchronous circuit design and fabrication.
• Open-source availability promotes wider adoption and further development in the field.