Managing the power consumption of ICs is an increasingly difficult challenge, because each new generation of portable device includes expanded features and demands longer battery lives.

As system-on-chip (SoC) designs grow larger, designers must grapple with serious global timing problems, the effect of wire loading and timing delays and the performance hit associated with supporting ...

A software tool for automatically converting synchronous circuit designs into asynchronous equivalents is being developed by researchers at the University of Edinburgh. Asynchronous ICs – which do not ...

Wire delay is beginning to dominate gate delay in current CMOS technologies. According to Moore’s Law by 2016 CMOS feature size should be on the order of 22 nm with clock frequencies reaching around ...

Computer architecture researchers evaluate key areas such as pipelining, organization, instruction issue, branching, and exception handling when considering asynchronous and synchronous design and ...

Non-mainstream technologies can offer advantages over more commonly used approaches, but usually at some additional cost (otherwise they’d probably be mainstream). The additional cost could be in ...

Given the growing importance and impact of portable, battery-operated devices in today’s society, it’s easy to understand why power consumption has become such a critical factor in IC design. But it’s ...

Seiko Epson developed what it claims is the world's first flexible 8bit asynchronous microprocessor, using low-temperature polysilicon thin-film transistors (LTPS-TFTs) on a plastic substrate. With ...

Time is running out for the clocks that make our computers tick. Scientists have developed a new generation of hardware and software based on the simpler designs of the 1950s. Asynchronous, or ...