IEEE Design & Test

This special issue introduces Design & Test readers to several key developments and the landscape of recent research in asynchronous design.

Asynchronous or clockless design is poised to play a key role in alleviating fundamental challenges of current and future microelectronic circuits and systems. Asynchronous design abandons clocking in favor of handshaking, thereby enhancing design ...

Editor's note:Pipelining is a key element of high-performance design. Distributed synchronization is at the same time one of the key strengths and one of the major difficulties of asynchronous pipelining. It automatically provides elasticity and on-...

Editors' note:Metastability can arise whenever a signal is sampled close to a transition, leading to indecision as to its correct value. Synchronizer circuits, which guard against metastability, are becoming ubiquitous with the proliferation of timing ...

Editors' note:The high-performance benefits of asynchronous design have hitherto been obtained only using full-custom design. This article presents an industrial-strength asynchronous ASIC CAD flow that enables the automatic synthesis and physical ...

Editors' note:This article presents a case study of a fast and energy-efficient hardware implementation of a stack. The design is highly scalable, as its cycle time remains unchanged and energy per operation grows very slowly, with an increase in the ...

Editors' note:This article presents the design of a cryptographic chip using a globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) design methodology. The design demonstrates the key advantage of using asynchrony in cryptography: the randomization of ...

Editor's note:Emerging computing technologies inherently exhibit high process and timing variation. Many researchers believe that an asynchronous approach is likely to play an enabling role in making these technologies feasible. This article compares ...

Editors' note:Asynchronous circuits are well-suited to ultra-low-power design. This article presents a microsystem that is powered only by energy extracted from the environment to implement an autonomous sensing application. Key to this application is ...

Conference Reports features the European Test Symposium.

This roundtable is based on the topic of hardware security and trust, which was the focus of the IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST 2011) held with the 2011 Design Automation Conference.

How will today's technology advance to the enablement of hundreds of teraoperations per square centimeter of silicon, and hundreds of terabits per second transmitted both intra- and inter-chip, delivering the desired user experiences while always ...

This column examines explicit and implicit contributions to standards groups.

This is a review of A Practical Introduction to PSL (Springer, 2006) by Cindy Eisner and Dana Fisman. It is an excellent manual for engineers. The author explains why, seven years after the IEEE standardization, the absence of a textbook on PSL for the ...

This newsletter covers news, research, and events related to the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation.

This newsletter provides information on past and upcoming events related to the IEEE Computer Society's Test Technology Technical Council and the test community.

The one problem yet to be adequately solved in the growing asynchronous community is the synchronous design industry momentum, which has proven hard to redirect to include asynchronous options. This column examines some of the reasons why.