Design of a Low Power, Relative Timing Based Asynchronous MSP430 Microprocessor
Dipanjan Bhadra and Kenneth S. Stevens
University of Utah
ABSTRACT
Power dissipation is one of the primary design constraints in modern digital circuits. From a magnitude of hand-held portable devices to big data analytics using highperformance computing, low energy dissipation is a key requirement for most modern devices. This paper showcases an elegant low power circuit design methodology based on Relative Timing driven asynchronous techniques. A low power MSP430 microprocessor design based on a novel asynchronous finite state machine implementation is presented. The design showcases the power benefits of the proposed asynchronous implementation over the synchronous counterpart and avoids major architectural modification which would directly influence the performance or power consumption. The implemented asynchronous MSP430 exhibits a minimum of 8x; power benefit over the synchronous design for an almost identical pipeline structure and comparable throughput. The paper further elaborates on the novel asynchronous state machine implementation used for the design and presents an efficient method to design communicating asynchronous finite state machines in clock-less systems.
Keywords: MSP430, Microprocessor, Low-power, Asynchronous circuits, Relative timing.
