A Robust C-element Design with Enhanced Metastability Performance
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2017 ACM. Metastability causes unpredictable behavior in circuits which can sometimes cause circuit failure. Although much work has been done to reduce the possibility of metastability in synchronous designs, metastability in asynchronous designs has not been given significant attention to date. For asynchronous designs, metastability resolution is assumed to be handled by the handshaking protocol. However, metastability might manifest (at the electrical level) in various asynchronous circuit elements for special timing cases. One such circuit element is the C-element, which is heavily used in asynchronous circuit design. The C-element is vulnerable to metastability conditions at its output, when there is a short overlap in the input values. In this paper, a robust design of a C-element is proposed, which aims at reducing the possibility of metastability at the output by using independent paths for the pull-up and pull-down transitions. Three different popular circuit topologies for a C-element have been studied and modified with the proposed approach. Experimental results show significant improvements in signal integrity at the output of the C-element, with up to 9 improvement in the metastability window.
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Proceedings of the on Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2017
