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RAPPID Project
In the summer of 1995, four academic researchers from the US
(Peter Beerel from USC, Chris Myers from U. of Utah, Ken Stevens from AFIT,
and Ken Yun from UCSD) and two from Israel (Ran Ginosar and Rakefet Kol from
the Technion) joined Shai Rotem of Intel at Intel Haifa to design a fully
asynchronous instruction length decoder for the x86 architecture. The RAPPID
project (Revolving Asynchronous Pentium Processor Instruction Decoder),
as it was later called, resulted in one of the most impressive asynchornous
designs to date. Using a combination of various aggressively timed design
methods, the resulting chip performed 3 times faster while only using
half the power of the comparable 400 MHz synchronous design. These results
clearly demonstrate the potential for substantial performance and power
gains from asynchronous design methods. This work was recently published
at the The Fifth International Symposium on Advanced Research in
Asynchronous Circuits and Systems, in the paper entitled:
RAPPID: An Asynchronous Instruction
Length Decoder. This paper won the best paper award at the conference.
"A chip plot for RAPPID."
"The best paper award from Async99, Sync, the evil dragon that must be destroyed (a replica of the famous statue made by Barcelona's Gaudi)."
"Another view of the evil Sync dragon."
"Members of the RAPPID design team (from left to right: Rakefet Kol, Chris Myers, Ken Stevens, Ran Ginosar, and Peter Beerel, not shown Shai Rotem and
Ken Yun)"
"The RAPPID design team displaying the evil Sync dragon."
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University of Utah 
