Design of gated-clock asynchronous wrappers for multi-point GALS systems

An interesting style for SoC (Systems-on-Chip) circuit design is the GALS (Globally Asynchronous, Locally Synchronous) paradigm, but its major drawback shows to be the asynchronous interfaces, especially when the GALS system is applied to a multi-point topology. The asynchronous interfaces found in literature are based on port controllers and can be called asynchronous wrappers (AW). They are responsible for data communication between locally synchronous modules, where, to each point of data communication, there is an input or an output port. The increasing number of ports leads to complex AWs and to a high increase in area. This paper proposes a new asynchronous interface focused on multi-point GALS. In a case study, considering a multi-point data communication system, the proposed interface achieved an average reduction of 33% and 41% in latency times, when compared to two different AWs found in literature.