An Asynchronous Processor Simulator

Abstract

Asynchronous processors have become a new direction of modern architecture research these years. To compare the improvement of different approaches without designing a real chip, we need a code-based simulator. The SimAsync, an asynchronous processor simulator was developed. The simulator tools are based on SimpleScalar[1], a public simulator of modern microprocessors. out that some problems, like branch miss penalty and data dependency, cannot be solved easily in asynchronous environment. The power dissipation reduction is not as good as expected, neither. Because the additional control logics between each stage also need power, the implementation of control logic should be more refined. On the other hand,