Handshake protocol using return-to-zero data encoding for high performance asynchronous bus

In SoC design, synchronous buses are used frequently to interconnect several IPs. However, it is difficult to use synchronous buses for SoC design because of the increase of wire delay caused by the crosstalk effect and the difficulty of synchronisation caused by the clock-skew problem. The use of an asynchronous bus is an alternative solution for SoC design methodology. A new handshake protocol is proposed using the return-to-zero data encoding scheme for the implementation of a new high performance asynchronous bus. Simulation results reveal that the proposed handshake protocol increases the read throughput of the asynchronous bus by 30.5%, and decreases the read latency by 12.5%.