The Lackey Self-Timed Switch-Fabric Design Framework

This paper demonstrates how to rapidly build useful, and high performance self-timed or elastic communication networks. The networks are elegantly extensible to include an arbitrary number of Producers and Consumers. Each switch within the network is built from multiple instances of a Latch Control Element (LaCkEy). The Lackey is a general circuit for self-timed data control. It is built once and then configured to implement a wide range of data routing functions. The circuits presented in this paper seek to maintain high performance, at a minimal cost in complexity.