Asynchronous design, Quo Vadis?

This talk will briefly discuss the history of the asynchronous design methodology, as its principles and approaches have evolved through the various notions of circuits and systems operating without a global clock, i.e., asynchronous FSMs, speed-independent and delay-insensitive circuits, self-timed systems, multi-synchronous and GALS SOCs. Along the way, and focusing more on the present day hiatus, opportunities, success stories and problems will be discussed as they are being faced in academic research and industrial exploitation. The speaker will be happy to share his experiences of near thirty years in the research he has been involved in the area of self-timed systems and circuits. These will cover designing systems with multiple clock domains, various signalling schemes and protocols, self-timed circuit synthesis, verification, Petri nets, timing-elastic and power-adaptive systems. Should he be particularly adventurous on the day, he might even try to make some predictions into future developments.