ASYNCHRONOUS EMBEDDED CONTROL

Asynchronous control offers potential advantages for embedded systems due to its inherent power-efficiency, electromagnetic compatibility an d modularity. However, the current design community is averse to async hronous design because it is perceived as being hard to design and man ufacture. Recent developments in asynchronous design have begun to add ress these misconceptions and commercial interest is beginning to grow , but there are still few large-scale demonstrations of the practical application of asynchronous techniques to commercially interesting des igns. This paper describes one such demonstrator. AMULET2e is an embed ded system chip which incorporates a 32-bit RISC microprocessor, a cac he memory and a flexible memory interface, all of which operate asynch ronously. This paper presents the motivation for asynchronous design, details of the AMULET2e organisation, the tools used to develop the de sign and the characteristics of the chip itself.