• ETRI Journal
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.480-490
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• 2013

As technology evolves into the deep submicron level, synchronous circuit designs based on a single global clock have incurred problems in such areas as timing closure and power consumption. An asynchronous circuit design methodology is one of the strong candidates to solve such problems. To verify the feasibility and efficiency of a large-scale asynchronous circuit, we design a fully clockless 32-bit processor. We model the processor using an asynchronous HDL and synthesize it using a tool specialized for asynchronous circuits with a top-down design approach. In this paper, two microarchitectures, basic and enhanced, are explored. The results from a pre-layout simulation utilizing 0.13-${\mu}m$ CMOS technology show that the performance and power consumption of the enhanced microarchitecture are respectively improved by 109% and 30% with respect to the basic architecture. Furthermore, the measured power efficiency is about 238 ${\mu}W$/MHz and is comparable to that of a synchronous counterpart.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.9 no.8
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• pp.1735-1740
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• 2005

SoC design integrates many IPs that operate at different frequencies and the use of the different clock for each IP makes the design the most effective one. An asynchronous FIFO is required as a kind of a buffer to connect IPs that are asynchronous. However, in many cases, asynchronous FIFO is designed improperly and the cost of the wrong design is high. In this paper, an asynchronous FIFO is designed to transfer data across asynchronous clock domains by using a valid bit scheme that eliminates the problem of the metastability and synchronization altogether. This FIFO architecture is described in HDL and synthesized to the Bate level to compare with other FIFO scheme. The subject mater of this paper is under patent pending.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.1038-1041
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• 2005

In today's SoC design, most of IPs which use the different clock frequency from that of the bus require asynchronous FIFOs. However, in many cases, asynchronous FIFO is designed improperly and the cost of the wrong design is high. In this paper, a register-based asynchronous FIFO is designed to transfer data in asynchronous clock domains by using a valid bits scheme that eliminates the problem of the metastability and synchronization altogether. This FIFO architecture is described in HDL and synthesized to the gate level to compare with other FIFO scheme.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.386-393
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• 2017

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are widely used for verification in chip development. In order to verify the circuit programmed to the FPGA, data must be input to the FPGA. There are many ways to communicate with a chip through a PC and an external board, but the simplest and easiest way is to use a universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART). Most recently, most circuits are designed to be internally connected to the advanced microcontroller bus architecture (AMBA) bus. In other words, to verify the designed circuit easily and simply, data must be transmitted through the AMBA bus through the UART. Also the AMBA bus has been available in various versions since version 4.0 recently. Advanced peripheral bus (APB) is suitable for simple testing. In this paper, we design a circuit for UART-to-APB interface. Circuits designed using Verilog-HDL were implemented in Altera Cyclone FPGAs and were capable of operating at speeds up to 380 MHz.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.71-81
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a novel Globally Asynchronous, Locally Dynamic System(GALDS) bus and demonstrate its performance. The proposed GALDS bus is the bidirectional multitasking bus with the segmented bus architecture supporting the concurrent operation of multi-masters and multi-slaves. By analyzing system tasks, the bus architecture chooses the optimal frequency for each If among multiples of bus frequency and thus we can reduce the overall power consumption. For efficient data communications between IPs operating in different frequencies, we designed an asynchronous and bidirectional FIFO based on an asynchronous wrapper with hand-shaking interface. In addition, since systems can be easily expandable by inserting bus segments, the proposed architecture has advantages in IP reusability and structural flexibility As a test example, a four-segment bus haying four masters and four slaves were designed by using Verilog HDL. We demonstrate multitasking operations with read/write data transfers by simulation when the ratios of operation frequency are 1:1, 1:2, 1:4 and 1:8. The data transfer mode is a 16 burst increment mode compatible with Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture(AMBA). The maximum operation latency of the proposed GALDS bus is 22 clock cycles for the bus write operation, and 44 clock cycles for read.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.85-94
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• 2003

The asynchronous design methods proved to have the higher performance in power consumption and execution speed than synchronous ones because it just needs to activate the required module without feeding clock in the system. Despite the advantage of CISC machine providing the variable addressing modes and instructions, its execution scheme is hardly suited for a synchronous Pipeline architecture and incurs a lot of overhead. This paper proposes a novel asynchronous pipeline architecture, A80sl, whose instruction set is fully compatible with that of Intel 80C51, an embedded micro controller. We classify the instructions into the group keeping the same execution scheme for the asynchronous pipeline and optimize it eliminating the bubble stage that comes from the overhead of the multi-cycle execution. The new methodologies for branch and various instruction lengths are suggested to minimize the number of states required for instructions execution and to increase its parallelism. The proposed A80C51 architecture is synthesized with 0.35${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$ CMOS standard cell library. The simulation results show higher speed than that of Intel 80C51 with 36 MHz and other asynchronous counterparts by 24 times.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2003.04d
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• pp.286-288
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• 2003

본 논문에서는 서로 다른 네트워크간의 다양한 프로토콜과 이종의 트래픽을 동시에 처리할 수 있는 네트워크용 SoC (System-on-a-Chip) 프로세서를 구현하였다. 제작된 네트워크 SoC 프로세서는 ARM 프로세서 코어와 ATM(Asynchronous Transfer Mode) 블록, 10/100 Mbps 이더넷 볼록, 스케쥴러, UART 등을 이용하였고 각 블록은 AM8A (Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture) 버스로 연결하였다. SoC 프로세서는 CADENCE사의 VerilogHDL을 이용하여 설계하였고 0.35$\mu\textrm{m}$ 셀 라이브러리를 이용하여 검증하였다. 구현된 칩은 총 게이트수가 312,000개이며 칠의 최대 동작 주파수는 50MHz 이다.

• Proceedings of the Korea Multimedia Society Conference
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• 2002.05c
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• pp.1-5
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• 2002

본 논문에서는 UART(Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter)를 soft IP(Intellectual Property) 모듈 형태로써 VLSI 설계과정을 통하여 구현하였다. 이 모듈은 현재 각종 통신 디바이스에서 최하 말단에서 직렬 데이터를 시스템으로 받아들이거나 병렬 데이터를 직렬 라인에 실어 보내는 중요한 역할을 담당한다. 본 연구에서 설계한 UART는 간단한 모듈 형태로 제작되어 있어 Verilog-HDL을 사용하여 직렬 송ㆍ수신을 필요로 하는 시스템에 내장되어 사용될 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 설계 순서에 따라 UART를 설계하고 Simulation을 하고 Synopsys Tool을 사용하여 Compile 과 Synthesis 후 Gate Area 와 Belay를 검출해 내었다. 합성결과 0.25$\mu$m 공정의 CMOS Cell Library를 사용하였을 경우 전체 면적은 1,013 gate가 나왔다. 본 논문에서 설계한 UART의 최장경로가 최대 4.12ns로 나타났으며, 최대 동작 클럭 주파수는 200MHz 로써 150Mbps 이상의 전송 속도를 가진다.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.328-336
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• 2003

Bluetooth is a specification for short-range wireless communication using the 2.4 GHz ISM band. It emphasizes low complexity, low power, and low cost. This paper describes an area-efficient digital baseband module for wireless technology. For area-efficiency, we carefully consider hardware and software partitioning. We implement complex control tasks of the Bluetooth baseband layer protocols in software running on an embedded microcontroller. Hardware-efficient functions, such as low-level bitstream link control; host controller interfaces (HCIs), such as universal asynchronous receiver transmitter (UART) and universal serial bus (USB)interfaces; and audio Codec are performed by dedicated hardware blocks. Furthermore, we eliminate FIFOs for data buffering between hardware functional units. The design is done using fully synthesizable Verilog HDL to enhance the portability between process technologies so that our module can be easily integrated as an intellectual property core no system-on-a-chip (SoC) ASICs. A field programmable gate array (FPGA) prototype of this module was tested for functional verification and realtime operation of file and bitstream transfers between PCs. The module was fabricated in a $0.25-{\mu}m$ CMOS technology, the core size of which was only 2.79 $mm{\times}2.80mm$.