On the design of high-performance and energy-efficient probabilistic self-timed systems

Traditional synchronous systems relied on a global clock to maintain synchronization have incurred problems in worst-case performance and power consumption. A self-timed system that does not depend on a global clock is one of the high-caliber candidates to solve such problems. In this paper, a probabilistic self-timed system model is studied, on which task execution time is represented by a random variable. This paper presents the fundamental properties on time behavior of the probabilistic self-timed system and establishes formulas to calculate its throughput. Then, using the results, efficient algorithms are designed to optimize system throughput and minimize energy consumption. Experimental results show that the throughput of self-timed systems optimized by our algorithms achieves 33.73% improvement compared with that of the optimized synchronous systems. Additionally, the proposed algorithms on minimizing energy can make a good performance-energy tradeoff, achieving 64.36% improvement on energy consumption with little reduction on performance.