Performance estimation and slack matching for pipelined asynchronous architectures with choice

This paper presents a fast analytical method for estimating the throughput of pipelined asynchronous systems, and then applies that method to develop a fast solution to the problem of pipelining ldquoslack matchingrdquo. The approach targets systems with hierarchical topologies, which typically result when high-level (block structured) language specifications are compiled into data-driven circuit implementations. A significant contribution is that our approach is the first to efficiently handle architectures with choice (i.e. the presence of conditional computation constructs such if-then-else and conditional loops).