Performance analysis of four-phase untimed asynchronous handshake protocols

This thesis presents the trade-offs between concurrency reduction, energy and performance across a four-phase untimed asynchronous protocol family. The formal understanding of the handshake protocols will provide the designers the information to build circuits that can meet the power, performance and storage needs. The trade-offs involved with the characterization of the family of four-phase protocols are largely due to reduction of concurrency. The common generally accepted notion is that concurrency reduction does decrease the state space and thus provides a better chance for logic optimization and results in a smaller and faster implementation but makes the protocol of the system slower. This thesis reports the trade-offs in trying to find the optimal protocols having optimal performance, power and area.