Clockless Computing

ender81b writes "Scientific American is carrying a nice article on asynchronous chips. In general, the article advocates that eventually all computer systems will have to move to an asynchronous design. The article focuses on Sun's efforts but gives a nice overview of the general concept of asynchronous chip design." We had another story about this last year.

Comments

The Amiga Zorro Bus was Asyncronous

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another old idea revived. The Amiga's Zorro expansion bus was asyncronous and plug n play in the 80s (although the rest of the machine was clocked).

Re:Return of the 68000?

[AstroJetson]

Exactly right. Nowdays, most of the Motorola embedded processors (many of which use 68000 or 68020 cores) can generate their own DTACK signals. For example, the 68302 has four CS (chip select) lines that you can internally map to whatever address ranges you want. You specify how many wait states are required and the DTACK and CS signals get generated automagically. This cuts down dramatically on on-board glue logic and address decoding logic, which is important for (typically small) embedded designs.

No mention of Theseus Logic?

[BitMan]

Unless I missed it, there was no mention of Theseus Logic's Null Convention Logic at all which is a real disappointment. Theseus has one of the few approaches that doesn't require a PhD-level of education to understand and design in.