Report Number: CSL-TR-94-652
Institution: Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory
Title: Automatic Synthesis and Verification of Gate-Level Timed Circuits
Author: Myers, Chris J.
Author: Rokicki, Tomas G.
Author: Meng, Teresa H.-Y.
Date: December 1994
Abstract: This paper presents a CAD system for the automatic synthesis and verification of gate-level timed circuits. Timed circuits are a class of asynchronous circuits which incorporate explicit timing information in the specification which is used throughout the synthesis procedure to optimize the design. This system accepts a textual specification capable of specifying general circuit behavior and timing requirements. This specification is systematically transformed to a graphical representation that can be analyzed using an exact and efficient timing analysis algorithm to find the reachable state space. From this state space, our synthesis procedure derives a timed circuit that is hazard-free using only basic gates to facilitate the mapping to semi-custom components, such as standard-cells and gate-arrays. The resulting gate-level timed circuit implementations are up to 40 percent smaller and 50 percent faster than those produced using other asynchronous design methodologies. We also demonstrate that our timed designs can be smaller and faster than their synchronous counterparts. To address verification, we have applied our timing analysis algorithm to verify efficiently not only our synthesized circuits but also a wide collection of reasonable-sized, highly concurrent timed circuits that could not previously be verified using traditional techniques.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/94/652/CSL-TR-94-652.pdf