Click-Based Asynchronous Mesh Network with Bounded Bundled Data

We have implemented an asynchronous mesh network. This paper describes our innovative design using a Click controller. Compared to designs that use other asynchronous circuit families with C-elements and four-phase bundled data, our two-phase Click-based Bounded Bundled Data design is faster, but introduces phase skews when handling concurrent traffic at a single node. Instead of eliminating the phase skews, we use them as computation slots. Our network uses a novel asynchronous arbiter with a queue that can accept data from both the four cardinal directions as well as from a local source, five directions in all. We have implemented our network design in 1 × 1, 2 × 2 and 4 × 4 sizes, larger network could be implemented easier since the isomorphism and modularity of the routing nodes. Our experiments show that an initial data item passes through a node in 157ns v.s. 81ns for non-delay-branch and delay-branch designs separately. Following items take about 65% as long. But for a network, the average latency of a node keeps almost same for different paths. We believe that with the non-delay-branch designs, our asynchronous mesh network could offer 10.1M routes per second for a 1 × 1 network and 5.33M routes per second for 2 × 2 or 5.06M for 4 × 4 networks, and work at the rate of 17.3M, 10.1M and 11.7M with the enhanced delay-branch way. For both cases, its latency is approximately linear with scale.