Performance-preserving clustering of elastic controllers

Asynchronous and latency-insensitive circuits offer a similar form of elasticity that tolerates variations in the delays or the latencies of the computation and communication resources of a system. This flexibility comes at the expense of including a control layer that synchronizes the flow of information. This paper proposes a method for reducing the complexity of the control layer by clustering controllers with similar functionality. The approach reduces the control layer and the number of elastic buffers to a significantly smaller elastic skeleton that preserves the performance of the system. The method also takes into account layout information, thus avoiding optimizations that can be physically unfeasible. The experimental results indicate that drastic reductions in the complexity of the control can be obtained.