Uncle - An RTL Approach to Asynchronous Design

Robert B. Reese, Scott C. Smith, Mitchell A. Thornton
2012 2012 IEEE 18th International Symposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems  
Uncle (Unified NULL Convention Logic Environment) is an end-to-end toolset for creating asynchronous designs using NULL Convention Logic (NCL). Designs are specified in Verilog RTL, with the user responsible for specifying registers, datapath elements, and finite state machines for controlling datapath sequencing. A commercial synthesis tool is used to produce a gate-level netlist of primitive logic gates and storage elements, which is then transformed into an NCL netlist by the Uncle mapping
more » ... ow. Performance optimizations supported by the flow are net buffering for target slew and delay balancing between latch stages. Both data-driven and control-driven (i.e. Balsa-style) schemes are supported. Transistor count, performance, and energy comparisons are made for Uncle versus Balsa-generated netlists for GCD and Viterbi decoder designs, with the Uncle designs comparing favorably in all three areas.
doi:10.1109/async.2012.14 dblp:conf/async/ReeseST12 fatcat:sk7pdg2cbfftdknwj2p5m3ngpy