Pipelining is a widely used approach to the design of high-throughput computation systems, where the slowest component is decomposed into a set of sequentially connected parts that are executed in parallel on successive items of the incoming dataflow. Such dataflow pipelines are often designed to be dynamically reconfigurable to process data items differently depending on their contents and/or to adjust to the application requirements in runtime. Reconfigurable synchronous pipelines are widely used and well studied, and are supported by industrial EDA tools. On the other hand, reconfigurable asynchronous pipelines received much less attention and their industrial adoption is low due to the lack of mature automation support. In this article, we present a model and tool support for the design and verification of reconfigurable asynchronous pipelines. The tool is open source and is available as a plugin for the WORKCRAFT toolset. We validate the presented approach by designing and fabricating a test chip (TSMC 90 nm) that demonstrates the benefits and costs of dynamic reconfigurability, as well as highlights the resilience of asynchronous pipelines.

中文翻译：

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可重构异步流水线的设计与实现

流水线是设计高吞吐量计算系统的一种广泛使用的方法，其中最慢的组件被分解为一组顺序连接的部分，这些部分在传入数据流的连续项目上并行执行。此类数据流管道通常设计为可动态重新配置，以根据其内容以不同方式处理数据项和/或在运行时根据应用程序要求进行调整。可重构同步流水线被广泛使用和深入研究，并得到工业 EDA 工具的支持。另一方面，由于缺乏成熟的自动化支持，可重构异步管道受到的关注较少，工业采用率低。在本文中，我们为可重构异步管道的设计和验证提供了模型和工具支持。该工具是开源的，可作为 WORKCRAFT 工具集的插件使用。我们通过设计和制造测试芯片 (TSMC 90 nm) 来验证所提出的方法，该芯片展示了动态可重构性的优势和成本，并突出了异步管道的弹性。