Hazard Checking of Timed Asynchronous Circuits Revisited

This paper proposes a new approach for the hazard checking of timed asynchronous circuits. Previous papers proposed either exact algorithms, which suffer from statespace explosion, or efficient algorithms which use a (conservative) approximation to avoid state-space explosion but can result in the rejection of designs which are valid. In particular, [7] presents a timed extention of the work in [1] which is very efficient but is not able to handle circuits with internal loops, which prevents its use in some cases. We propose a new approach to the problem in order to overcome the mentioned limitations, without sacrificing efficiency. To do so, we first introduce a general framework targeted at the conservative checking of safety failures. This framework is not restricted to the checking of timed asynchronous circuits. Secondly, we propose a new (conservative) semantics for timed circuits, in order to use the proposed framework for hazard checking of such circuits. Using this frame...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ACSD
• Authors: Frédéric Béal, Tomohiro Yoneda, Chris J. Myers
• Keywords: ACSD 2007, Efficient Algorithm, Hardware, Hazard Checking, Timed Asynchronous Circuits