An architecture for globally-synchronous locally-asynchronous systems on FPGAs

Taking advantage of synchronous and asynchronous paradigms, a new style of design called Globally Synchronous Locally Asynchronous (GSLA) has achieved very interesting results. In this paper, we propose a high-performance interface that allows the communication of synchronous to asynchronous to synchronous modules. Internally, the proposed interface comprises an asynchronous module. The GSLA design style is the most suitable one for FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) platforms, because it facilitates the SoC (Systems-on-Chip) design. Through a case study, the “differential equation solver”, we show that the proposed interface presents a reduction of 33% in the processing time when compared with a synchronous design. The proposed interface lets you interact with other synchronous modules in a frequency up to 500 MHz.