Asynchronous, Adiabatic Systems

I've been reading a bunch of papers about Adiabatic, Asynchronous Logic systems and Optical interconnect and switching. These seems like three interesting methods that will alleviate the speed / power tradeoff.

When most people in the computing world hear "SOA" they think service oriented architecture. For the real EE geeks, Semiconductor Optical Amplifier may come to mind. Optical circuits could potentially run 100s of times faster than electronic components and consume very little interconnect power.

Adiabatic systems recover the energy used to perform a function by using clocks as 1 and 0 and maintaining a copy of the function inverse so that there is no entropy change in the system. The result is that very little energy is lost by the system. As the time for the transition approaches infinite, the energy consumed by the function approaches 0. The amount of energy consumed is dependent on the square of the rate of transition. Since more logic is required to compute the inverse there is an area tradeoff. Additionally, energy must be injected into the system to make up for the switching rate which adds complexity to the system design.

Asynchronous systems do not have a clock, and must rely upon asynchronous handshake among communicating components to function correctly. This asynchronous handshake could potentially provide the energy required for an adiabatic circuit to function. I've heard of Achronix making highspeed asynchronous FPGAs. I'm not sure if asynchronous, adiabatic FPGAs exist yet, but I'm willing to bet they will eventually.

I've been concocting an asynchronous FPGA programming method based on rules and guarded atomic actions. Two points in there worth noting: the lumped RAM and router view of an FPGA and the use of an FSM to locally manage the routing table of an FPGA. Locally managed routing presents a miniature microcoded architectures to sequentially implement functions, trading off functional units for RAM and thus enabling "virtualized" structural recursion.

Asynchronous FPGA research at Cornell
Some references on Adiabatic Logic:
Asymptotically Zero Energy Computing Using Split-Level Charge Recovery Logic
Adiabatic CMOS gate and adiabatic circuit design for low-power applications