Computers without Clocks

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.