Can Elastic circuits guarantee a minimum performance from a specification point of view? Would it better and more predictable than the current worst-case performance?
Because of the margins required to design the matched delays, the guaranteed worst-case performance could be slightly worse than the one in a synchronous design. However, the amortized average performance is significantly better. Elastic Clocks are reliable from the point of view of the internal synchronization of the chip. However, Elastic Clocks may manifest some cycle-by-cycle non-deterministic timing. For example, the frequency of an elastic circuit could oscillate by a small percentage around an average frequency. This jitter potentially has a highly beneficial effect on power integrity, reducing Vdd and ground noise, and electro-magnetic emission, since it lowers the harmonics by spreading the edges over time. Even though the cycle-by-cycle behavior can suffer some non-deterministic jitter, an average frequency can still be guaranteed, by using an external reference clock from which the Elastic Clocks can deviate by a bounded amount. As an example, Elastic Clocks could run at an
