Dissertation Announcement for Ryan Taylor
12/19/17 at 10:00 AM
December 6, 2017
Dear Faculty, Graduate and Undergraduate students,
You are cordially invited to my Ph.D. dissertation defense.
Dissertation Title: Investigation of a control-driven design style for a 16-bit microprocessor implementation.
When: Tuesday, December 19, 2017, 10:00 AM
Where: Simrall 228
Candidate: Ryan “Drew” Taylor
Degree: Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering
Committee:
Dr. Bob Reese, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Major Professor)
Dr. Sherif Abdelwahed, Former Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University and Current Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University (Committee Member)
Dr. J.W. Bruce, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Committee Member)
Dr. Bryan Jones, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Committee Member)
Abstract
Asynchronous design is a possible alternative design methodology that has the ability to alleviate issues associated with clock skew, power dissipation, and process and environmental variability among transistors, issues that are encountered in typical synchronous design methodologies. This investigation studies the implementation of two asynchronous models of the Texas Instruments MSP430 processor family using a logic system known as Null Convention Logic (NCL). Two design styles of NCL are investigated: the data-driven and control-driven design styles. It is shown through this example and others that although there are trade offs in chip area and performance, the control-driven design style is a viable methodology that can lead to designs that are low in energy usage.
The openMSP430 processor project is used as a baseline for the investigation as it is a mature open-source project that has been silicon-proven multiple times and is a fully synthesizable system paralleling the original Texas Instruments family nearly cycle for cycle. A toolset called UNCLE (Unified NCL Environment) is used to create comparable implementations of the openMSP430 architecture that are data-driven and control-driven in nature.
It is shown that the control-driven implementation has a slightly larger chip area due to the complexity of the control path and its effects on the data path. While the control path is optimized for area, the data path of the control-driven version is larger than that of the data-driven mo del. Because of these issues of complexity in both the control and data paths, the performance of the model suffers as well, degrading from the already poor performance of the traditional data-driven NCL model. However, one positive characteristic of control-driven design can be the energy usage of the circuit. As with most design choices in engineering, there are trade offs when using either design style of NCL. This investigation serves to allow designers to make a well-informed decision when deciding between the two.
Best Regards,
Drew Taylor
Doctoral Candidate
Simrall 330-11
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mississippi State University