New approaches to design asynchronous circuits on FPGAs

FPGA device is a dominant implementation medium for digital circuits. Unfortunately, they do not support asynchronous circuits because of the lack of asynchronous circuit elements such as Muller gates, etc. In this paper, new efficient approaches are proposed to prototype asynchronous or mixed synchronous/ asynchronous circuits on look-up table-based (LUT) FPGA rapidly. The developed techniques are based on building of elements which play an important role in asynchronous circuits. The hazard-free elements are predefined in libraries in HDL and EDIF format. Timing and/or area constraints for place&route tool are automatically generated to map the asynchronous elements on suitable FPGA´s logic blocks. Several FPGA devices such as Altera, Xilinx and Actel could be used as target for the implementation. For the purpose of demonstration, some asynchronous circuits are implemented with Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA family.