CAR: On the highway towards de-synchronization

Despite its advantages in terms of robustness, power consumption or even performances, asynchronous design struggles to take a significant place in the industry. The required step by the designers to jump the gap between synchronous and asynchronous circuits remains too wide for the moment. In order to easily fullfil this gap, this work uses an asynchronous circuit class almost familar for synchronous designers: the micropipelines. The proposed method to make easy desynchronization is based on grouping registers that are inherently triggered together: the Concurrently Activated Registers (CAR). First, the context of utilization and the method are presented in details. Then the method is applied to an Advanced Encryption Standard block (AES). For this application, the proposed method exhibits an easy way to desynchronized circuits with a negligible area overhead and potential power consumption reduction compared to previous works.