I've always been fascinated by async circuits but don't know how state of the art has progressed since the early 2000s. Would any EEs be willing to comment?
There are a number of technologies that just aren't worth pursuing until the "normal progress" slows down. Transmeta, for instance, arguably died because while they produced a superior chip, by the time they could ship it they were basically tied with what Intel was putting out anyhow.
Asynchronous chips is an example of the sort of thing I expect to start hearing about again when we run out of die shrinks. Which we're getting pretty close to, probably. (Another example is "active RAM" where the RAM sticks can do some sort of computation. Also something like the greenarray chips [1]... while they're trying to compete with normal growth it's hard for a tiny company to get traction.)
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There are a number of technologies that just aren't worth pursuing until the "normal progress" slows down.
I don't know. The field of low-power micro-controllers doesn't really benefit much from scaling, since sleep current increase when decreasing transistor size. And they are relatively simple circuits(with low-cost development) but still a huge market, so it's an ideal place to try a new development methodology.
And yes, some have tried, but it's not being used today, so it probably failed.
The tools are a big obstacle. The industry is built around synchronous design. How are you going to time your circuit? Verify it? Etc.
It's a really big chunk of work to bite off, even with a "little" microcontroller.
We might see it one day, but as best I can tell things like sleep states are still a big focus, as they can save orders of magnitude power, instead of a few percent.
