Characterization and synthesis of a 32-bit asynchronous microprocessor in synchronous reconfigurable devices

Abstract

2015 Abstract This paper presents the design, implementation, and experimental results of 32-bit asynchronous microprocessor developed in a synchronousreconfigurable device (FPGA), taking advantage of a hard macro. It has support for floating point operations, such as addition, subtraction,and multiplication, and is based on the IEEE 754-2008 standard with 32-bit simple precision. This work describes the different blocks of themicroprocessors as delay modules, needed to implement a Self-Timed (ST) protocol in a synchronous system, and the operational analysis of theasynchronous central unit, according to the developed occupations and speeds. The ST control is based on a micropipeline used as a centralizedgenerator of activation signals that permit the performance of the operations in the microprocessor without the need of a global clock. This workcompares the asynchronous microprocessor with a synchronous version. The parameters evaluated are power consumption, area, and speed. Bothcircuits were designed and implemented in an FPGA Virtex 5. The performance obtained was 4 MIPS for the asynchronous microprocessor against1.6 MIPS for the synchronous.All Rights Reserved © 2015 Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Centro de Ciencias Aplicadas y Desarrollo Tecnologico. This is anopen access item distributed under the Creative Commons CC License BY-NC-ND 4.0.