In: Concurrency and Hardware Design, pages 313-344. Advances in Petri Nets, Volume 2549 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science / J. Cortadella, A. Yakovlev, G. Rozenberg (Eds.) --- Springer Verlag, November 2002.
Abstract: In an increasing number of instances, asynchronous circuit can provide advantages in either performance, power, electromagnetic interference, and/or design time. Asynchronous circuits circumvent the limitations and somewhat rigid design framework associated with global synchronization dictated by a globally distributed clock signal. Instead, asynchronous systems generally consist of a collection of parallel computation processes that synchronize and exchange data through handshaking-based communication. This facilitates pipelining communication across long distances, optimizing for average case behavior, and integrating slow and fast processes.