Asynchronous Chips

Asynchronous Chips  Seminar Material

INTRODUCTION

Computer chips of today are synchronous. They contain a main clock, which controls the timing of the entire chips. There are problems, however, involved with these clocked designs that are common today.

One problem is speed. A chip can only work as fast as its slowest component.

Therefore, if one part of the chip is especially slow, the other parts of the chip are forced to sit idle. This wasted computed time is obviously detrimental to the speed of the chip.

New problems with speeding up a clocked chip are just around the corner. Clock frequencies are getting so fast that signals can barely cross the chip in one clock cycle. When we get to the point where the clock cannot drive the entire chip, we’ll be forced to come up with a solution. 

One possible solution is a second clock, but this will incur overhead and power consumption, so this is a poor solution. It is also important to note that doubling the frequency of the clock does not double the chip speed, therefore blindly trying to increase chip speed by increasing frequency without considering other options is foolish.

The other major problem with c clocked design is power consumption. The clock consumes more power that any other component of the chip. The most disturbing thing about this is that the clock serves no direct computational use. A clock does not perform operations on information; it simply orchestrates the computational parts of the computer.

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