Robert Southworth

The design of an asynchronous MIPS R3000 microprocessor

The design of an asynchronous clone of a MIPS R3000 microprocessor is presented. In 0.6 /spl mu/m CMOS, we expect performance close to 280 MIPS, for a power consumption of 7 W. The paper describes the structure of a high-performance asynchronous pipeline, in particular precise exceptions, pipelined caches, arithmetic, and registers, and the circuit techniques developed to achieve high throughput.

A 72-Port 10G Ethernet Switch/Router Using Quasi-Delay-Insensitive Asynchronous Design

The design of a commercially-shipping 72-port 10G Ethernet switch router integrated circuit is presented. The 1.2 billion transistor chip consists of a core of > 1GHz asynchronous circuits surrounded by standard synchronous logic for external interfaces. It is manufactured in a TSMC 65nm process. The asynchronous circuitry includes 15MB of single-ported SRAM, 150KB of dual-ported SRAM, 100KB of TCAM, Tb bandwidth crossbars, and a fully pipelined programmable packet processor processing one billion packets per second. The design implementation relied heavily on a novel tool flow utilizing both commercial and proprietary EDA tools for automatic place-and-route of asynchronous layout.