Sequential Optimization of Asynchronous and Synchronous Finite-State Machines

Asynchronous, or unclocked, digital systems have several potential advantages over their synchronous counterparts. In particular, they address a number of challenging problems faced by the designers of large-scale synchronous digital systems: power consumption, worst-case timing constraints, and engineering and design reuse issues associated with the use of a fixed-rate global clock. Moreover, while for synchronous systems these problems are exacerbated by increasing system size, asynchronous systems promise to scale more gracefully.