A Low Latency Asynchronous FIFO Combining a Wave Pipeline with a Handshake Scheme

Abstract

This paper presents a new asynchronous FIFO design to reduce forward latency in a linear structure. The operation mode for each cell can be reconfigured dynamically as either of the two schemes, wave pipelining or handshaking, according to the data flow in the FIFO. The adoption of wave pipelining to the conventional self-timed FIFO can reduce the overhead of the handshaking as well as latching control in each stage. Initial pre-layout simulations indicate about two times of improvement on latency performance over a state-of-art asynchronous FIFO, while retaining its throughput.