Rapid prototyping of networks of asynchronous multiple functional units

The design cycle of the proposed asynchronous multiple functional unit networks, from CAD tool coding to post-layout scalability, adheres to the attributes of rapid prototyping. These attributes come in five flavors: an OOP style in CAD tools; a short design, modify, evaluate and profile cycle at the dataflow graph level; the reuse of predesigned components; effective event realization of the asynchronous behavior; and rapid VLSI realization. At the modeling level, a dataflow graph modeling tool specifies and profiles the asynchronous systems rapidly and accurately. At the architectural level, several multiple functional unit networks illustrate two rarely addressed issues in asynchronous design: modularity and scalability, which are the keys to rapid prototyping. Networks in a distributor approach and a tournament protocol are presented, where fixed and greedy operand assignments are used respectively. The tournament protocol also leads to a short physical design time and a compact VLSI layout for its regular structure.