Implementing asynchronous embryonic circuits using AARDVArc

Embryonic arrays display the desirable biological characteristics of fault-tolerance and a complex structure. They do not generally make use of a further biological characteristic; fundamentally asynchronous operation. Further to the inherent advantages of an asynchronous approach, scalability and reliability are perceived as benefits pertinent to embryonic designs. This paper advances a simulated asynchronous embryonic design by realising its functional logic using a Xilinx Virtex FPGA. The AARDVArc program augments the standard design tools to achieve this macromodule based implementation. The design is compared to a similar synchronous design in terms of its logic requirement and performance. Although requiring additional resources and operating less quickly than its synchronous counterpart, this work forms the basis for a fully asynchronous practical embryonic array.