August 1, 2002

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Computers without Clocks

Asynchronous chips improve computer performance by letting each circuit run as fast as it can

By Ivan E. Sutherland and Jo Ebergen

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Micropipelines. Ivan E. Sutherland: The Turing Award Lecture. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 32, No. 6, pages 720¿738; June 1989.

Asynchronous Circuits and Systems. Special issue of Proceedings of the IEEE; February 1999.

Principles of Asynchronous Circuit Design: A Systems Perspective. Edited by Jens Spars¿ and Steve Furber. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001.

IVAN E. SUTHERLAND and JO EBERGEN are true believers in asynchronous computing. Although Sutherland is best known as a pioneer of computer graphics--he invented the interactive graphics program Sketchpad in 1963--he became involved in asynchronous circuit design in the mid-1960s while building a graphics processor at Harvard University. He is now a vice president and fellow at Sun Microsystems, leading the Asynchronous Design Group at the company¿s laboratories. Ebergen became fascinated by asynchronous circuit design 20 years ago during a three-month stint as a research assistant to Charles L. Seitz of Caltech. He subsequently taught at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and the University of Waterloo in Canada before joining Sun¿s Asynchronous Design Group in the summer of 1996.

More by Ivan E. Sutherland and Jo Ebergen
Scientific American Magazine Vol 287 Issue 2This article was published with the title “Computers without Clocks” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 287 No. 2 ()
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican082002-7rr2oAfJqKMhKuT6cuiRDn
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