The first asynchronous microprocessor: the test results

Abstract

We have designed the first entirely asynchronous (also called self-timed or delay-insensitive) microprocessor. The design was reported at the Decennial Caltech Conference on VLSI, last March. The conference paper is included here as an appendix. Since the chips had not yet been fabricated at the moment of writing the conference paper, the paper does not include the results of the experiment. The purpose of this note is to publish these results, which are quite remarkable because of the speed reached on this first design, and, as importantly, because of the surprising robustness of the chips to variations in temperature and VDD voltage values.

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