HMF unit: A key element in dynamic dataflow ASIC

This paper presents a special element named HMF (hold-match-fetch) unit by us. The HMF unit implements token storing, token matching and token fetching mechanism that is necessary in dynamic dataflow ASIC. The HMF unit presented in this paper is implemented in asynchronous way and has been used in an AES ASIC chip, which is based on a dynamic dataflow structure and can resist different power analysis (DPA) attack by randomly changing the operations´ sequence. Due to the application requirement, a random fetching mechanism is implemented by the HMF unit in this example.