Price synchrony and formulate an asynchronous law

Price the energy cost of the clock network as a capability term and formulate the calibrated energy law for asynchronous, self-timed rings, including whether the accounting remains valid when synchrony and its clock tree are removed.

Background

The paper argues that synchrony is a major unpriced provisioned capability: a global clock causes flops to transition each cycle whether or not they are needed. The measured rent term includes the clock energy delivered to live flops, but the pre-layout extraction excludes the clock-distribution tree.

The proposed extension is to account for the clock network itself and to determine whether the law survives in asynchronous or self-timed ring architectures, including delay-line designs that do not use a conventional clock tree.

References

Pricing the clock, and asking whether the accounting survives its deletion (self-timed rings; the delay line was clocked by physics, not by a tree), is Open Problem~8.

— The Price of Remembering: A Calibrated Energy Law for Computation  (2609.00744 - Bergach, 1 Sep 2026) in Item (8), Section 7, “Open Problems”; discussed earlier in Section 6, “Rent on Choice”