To gain wider acceptance in the digital design community, it must be demonstrated that asynchronous design techniques can be used with the existing synchronous world. This thesis compares a micropipeline and a synchronous solution to a problem interfacing the synchronous world to the asynchronous world. In addition, the results obtained using the Tangram silicon compiler are compared. The example chosen as the vehicle for comparison is an I/O Expander for the I2C-Bus. The I/O Expander translates the synchronous, serial bus protocol into an 8-bit asynchronous handshaking interface.
The clock frequency of the I2C-Bus is low, and the circuit is small, so the results focus on low power consumption and the relative merits of each design technique. To achieve this aim, the asynchronous solutions use local communications between functional blocks where possible. The synchronous solution demonstrates the effectiveness of using clock gating to achieve a low power solution. The implications of using such synchronous techniques and asynchronous techniques for a wider range of applications are also discussed.