Is It Time for Clockless Chips?

by David Geer Computer, March 2005 Vendors are revisiting an old concept -- the clockless chip -- as they look for new processor approaches to work with the growing number of cellular phones, PDAs, and other high-performance, battery-powered devices. Clockless processors, also called asynchronous or self-timed, don't use the oscillating crystal that serves as the regularly "ticking" clock that paces the work done by traditional synchronous processors. Rather than waiting for a clock tick, clockless-chip elements hand off the results of their work as soon as they are finished. Recent breakthroughs have boosted clockless chips' performance, removing an important obstacle to their wider use. Read the article