Delay-insensitive pipelined communication on parallel buses

Consider a communication channel that consists of several sub-channels transmitting simultaneously and asynchronously. The receiver acknowledges reception of the message before the transmitter sends the following message. Namely, pipelined utilization of the channel is not possible. The main contribution of the paper is a scheme that enables to transmit without an acknowledgement of the message, therefore enabling pipelined communication and providing a higher bandwidth. Moreover, the scheme allows for a certain number of transitions from a second message to arrive before reception of the current message has been completed, a condition that the authors call skew. They have derived necessary and sufficient conditions for codes that can tolerate a certain amount of skew among adjacent messages, (therefore, allowing for continuous operation), and detect a larger amount of skew when the original skew is exceeded. Potential applications are in on-chip, on-board and board to board communications, enabling much higher communication bandwidth