Analyzing the impact of local and global indication on a self-timed system

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of local and global indication on a self-timed system architecture. Towards this end, we investigate the effect of these two indicating frameworks with respect to a 32-bit self-timed carry-ripple adder, constructed using a cascade of self-timed dual-bit adder modules. In both cases, the self-timed ripple carry adder corresponds to weak-indication. We consider the analysis from the perspective of both homogeneous and heterogeneous encoding of data, employing unordered delay-insensitive codes. The simulation results reveal that global indication benefits in terms of minimizing the power and area parameters while reporting a performance advantage over local indication.