Speed and Energy Optimised Quasi-Delay-Insensitive Block Carry Lookahead Adder

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new asynchronous quasi-delay-insensitive block carry lookahead adder (BCLARC) that outperforms existing adders in speed and energy efficiency using dual-rail encoding and specific handshaking protocols.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel QDI BCLARC design with redundancy carry, achieving significant improvements in speed and energy efficiency over existing asynchronous adders.

Findings

20.5% reduction in cycle time compared to QDI RCA

47.5% reduction in cycle time compared to QDI CCLA

32.9% reduction in cycle time compared to QDI CSLA

Abstract

We present a new asynchronous quasi-delay-insensitive (QDI) block carry lookahead adder with redundancy carry (BCLARC) realized using delay-insensitive dual-rail data encoding and 4-phase return-to-zero (RTZ) and 4-phase return-to-one (RTO) handshaking. The proposed QDI BCLARC is found to be faster and energy-efficient than the existing asynchronous adders which are QDI and non-QDI (i.e., relative-timed). Compared to existing asynchronous adders corresponding to various architectures such as ripple carry adder (RCA), conventional carry lookahead adder (CCLA), carry select adder (CSLA), BCLARC, and hybrid BCLARC-RCA, the proposed BCLARC is found to be faster and more energy-optimised. The cycle time (CT), which is the sum of forward and reverse latencies, governs the speed; and the product of average power dissipation and cycle time viz. the power-cycle time product (PCTP) defines the low power/energy efficiency. For a 32-bit addition, the proposed QDI BCLARC achieves the following average reductions in design metrics over its counterparts when considering RTZ and RTO handshaking: i) 20.5% and 19.6% reductions in CT and PCTP respectively compared to an optimum QDI early output RCA, ii) 16.5% and 15.8% reductions in CT and PCTP respectively compared to an optimum relative-timed RCA, iii) 32.9% and 35.9% reductions in CT and PCTP respectively compared to an optimum uniform input-partitioned QDI early output CSLA, iv) 47.5% and 47.2% reductions in CT and PCTP respectively compared to an optimum QDI early output CCLA, v) 14.2% and 27.3% reductions in CT and PCTP respectively compared to an optimum QDI early output BCLARC, and vi) 12.2% and 11.6% reductions in CT and PCTP respectively compared to an optimum QDI early output hybrid BCLARC-RCA. The adders were implemented using a 32/28nm CMOS technology.