Asynchronous Circuit Technology is on the Market

The seventh international symposium on asynchronous circuits and systems, in Salt Lake City, March 2001, featured a presentation with the challenging title ´Where are the Async Millionaires?´ The morale of this invited talk by Kevin Normoyle, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, was that if the asynchronous community claims that their technology is so promising, why doesn´t the technology create greed and fear. Greed in the sense that asynchronous technology might enable you to outperform your competition by exploiting unique possibilities, and fear that the competition may be doing this. The talk demonstrated an absence of fear and greed in the area of high performance computing. The number of asynchronous millionaires was proposed as a way to measure success. We are now at the fourteenth ASYNC conference in Newcastle, and seven years have passed. Today, hundreds of millions of asynchronous circuits are produced every year, and many of us may use it on a daily basis without being aware of it. As an example, asynchronous circuits designed using Handshake Solutions´ Timeless Design Environment (TiDE) may be found in the vast majority of electronic (biometric) passports, in in-vehicle networks like CAN and LIN, in MEMS-based sensors such as for measuring tire pressure, in access-control systems, and in Near Field Communication devices such as Nokia´s 6131 NFC phone. In the talk, the author want to address some of the steps that have been taken to bring this disruptive technology to the market, and the challenges that had and have to be overcome. It is now obvious to the author that asynchronous technology can create greed and fear. It should be only a matter of time before the first asynchronous millionaires arise.