Report Number: CSL-TR-95-686
Institution: Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory
Title: Automatic Synthesis of Burst-Mode Asynchronous Controllers
Author: Nowick, Steven Mark
Date: December 1995
Abstract: Asynchronous design has enjoyed a revival of interest recently, as designers seek to eliminate penalties of traditional synchronous design. In principle, asynchronous methods promise to avoid overhead due to clock skew, worst-case design assumptions and resynchronization of asynchronous external inputs. In practice, however, many asynchronous design methods suffer from a number of problems: unsound algorithms (implementations may have hazards), harsh restrictions on the range of designs that can be handled (single-input changes only), incompatibility with existing design styles and inefficiency in the resulting circuits. This thesis presents a new locally-clocked design method for the synthesis of asynchronous controllers. The method has been automated, is proven correct and produces high-performance implementations which are hazard-free at the gate-level. Implementations allow multiple-input changes and handle a relatively unconstrained class of behaviors (called "burst-mode" specifications). The method produces state-machine implementations with a minimal or near-minimal number of states. Implementations can be easily built in such common VLSI design styles as gate-array, standard cell and full-custom. Realizations typically have the latency of their combinational logic. A complete set of state and logic minimization algorithms has been developed and automated for the synthesis method. The logic minimization algorithm differs from existing algorithms since it generates two-level minimized logic which is also hazard-free. The synthesis program is used to produce competitive implementations for several published designs. In addition, a large real-world controller is designed as a case study: an asynchronous second-level cache controller for a new RISC processor.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/95/686/CSL-TR-95-686.pdf