While asynchronous logic has many potential advantages compared to traditional synchronous designs, one of the major drawbacks is its unpredictability with respect to temporal behavior. Having no high-precision oscillator, a self-timed circuit's execution speed is heavily dependent on temperature and supply voltage. Small fluctuations of these parameters already result in noticeable changes of the design's throughput and performance. Without further provisions this jitter makes the use of asynchronous logic hardly feasible for real-time applications. We investigate the temporal characteristics of self-timed circuits regarding their usage in real-time systems, especially the Time-Triggered Protocol. We propose a simple timing model and elaborate a self-adapting circuit which shall derive a suitable notion of time for both bit transmission and protocol execution. We further introduce and analyze our jitter compensation concept, which is a threefold mechanism to keep the asynchronous circuit's notion of time tightly synchronized to the remaining communication participants. To demonstrate the robustness of our solution, we perform different tests and investigate their impact on jitter and frequency stability. 1. Introduction Asynchronous circuits elegantly overcome some of the limiting issues of their synchronous counterparts. The often-cited potential advantages of asynchronous designs are—among others—reduced power consumption and inherent robustness against changing operating conditions [1, 2]. Recent silicon technology additionally suffers from high parameter variations and high susceptibility to transient faults [3]. Asynchronous (delay insensitive) design offers a solution due to its inherent robustness. A substantial part of this robustness originates in the ability to adapt the speed of operation to the actual propagation delays of the underlying hardware structures, due to the feedback formed by completion detection and handshaking. While asynchronous circuits' adaptive speed is hence a desirable feature with respect to robustness, it becomes a problem in real-time applications that are based on a stable clock and a fixed (worst-case) execution time. Therefore, asynchronous logic is commonly considered inappropriate for such real-time applications, which excludes its use in an important share of fault-tolerant applications that would highly benefit from its robustness. Consequently, it is reasonable to take a closer look at the actual stability and predictability of asynchronous logic's temporal behavior. After all, synchronous designs operate on
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