DCP: Improving the Throughput of Asynchronous Pipeline by Dual Control Path

Pipeline requires both low latency and high throughput. Synchronous pipeline achieves a near optimized throughput but suffers from the worst-case computation delay. Meanwhile, asynchronous pipeline keeps an optimized computation delay but suffers from the low throughput. In this paper, we present dual control path (DCP), a new structure of four-phase handshake asynchronous control path, to improve the throughput of asynchronous pipeline. We leverage the existing fully decoupled four-phase handshake elements and asymmetric delay elements to found DCP. Experimental results show the asynchronous pipeline with DCP could achieve high throughput as well as low computation delay, only with tiny area overhead.