An Energy Estimation Method for Asynchronous Circuits with Application to an Asynchronous Microprocessor

This paper presents a simulator operating on a logical representation of an asynchronous circuit that gives energy estimates within 10% of electrical (hspice) simulation.Our simulator is the first such tool in the literature specifically targeted to efficient energy estimation of QDI asychronous circuits. As an application, we show how the simulator has been used to accurately estimate the energy consumption in different parts of an asynchronous MIPS R3000 microprocessor.This is the first energy breakdown of an asychronous microprocessor in the literature.