3 ms·
Clock distribution eats a lot of power at gigahertz frequencies, and a lot of gates. > If you have to poll or await some other component arbitrarily, there wil
by baybal2 5y ago
Clock distribution eats a lot of power at gigahertz frequencies, and a lot of gates.
> If you have to poll or await some other component arbitrarily, there will necessarily be extra overhead and delays in these areas.
You don't poll. You have a lot of small input-clocked domains which work at a speed with which data comes.
- adrian_b 5y agoTrue, but asynchronous circuits need a lot of extra gates and signals for detecting when an operation is completed and notifying the next stage that it can proceed. It is very difficult to estimate which of the 2 approaches will need less area and power for some given requirements. It is likely that for a sufficiently complex device an asynchronous implementation will use less power, but the effort to design bug-free complex asynchronous logic is much higher than for synchronous designs, which is probably the main reason why very few commercial asynchronous devices have existed.