Design and Verification of Lazy and Hybrid Implementations of the SELF Protocol

Synchronous Elasticization converts an ordinary clocked circuit into Latency-Insensitive (LI) design. The Synchronous Elastic Flow (SELF) is an LI protocol that can be implemented with eager or lazy evaluation in the data steering network. Compared to lazy implementations, eager SELF designs have no combinational cycles and can have a performance advantage, but consume more area and power. The design space of lazy SELF protocols is evaluated and verified. Several new designs are mapped to hybrid eager/lazy implementations that retain the performance advantage of the eager design but have power advantages of lazy implementations.