Design and Evaluation of Burst-Mode Asynchronous 8-Bit Microprocessor Using Standard FPGA Development System

Asynchronous circuits possibly have several potential advantages in comparison with synchronous one. In this paper, we attempt to introduce asynchronous circuit design method into the control unit of our 8-bit microprocessor by the burst-mode design method and implemented the asynchronous 8-bit microprocessor with outputs to observe all registers and the program counter by using a standard FPGA development system. And then we evaluate the following four features: the FPGA logic resource usage, the execution time per machine instruction and the power and energy consumption in comparison with the synchronous one using same standard FPGA development system. As future work, we will try to develop the fault tolerant asynchronous microprocessor by using output ports to observe all registers and the program counter within the microprocessor.