Design Automation Of Real Life Asynchronous Devices And Systems

The number of gates on a chip is quickly growing toward and beyond the one billion mark. Keeping all the gates running at the beat of a single or a few rationally related clocks is becoming impossible. In static timing analysis process variations and signal integrity issues stretch the timing margins to the point where they become too conservative and result in significant overdesign. Importance and difficulty of such problems push some developers to once again turn to asynchronous alternatives. However, the electronics industry for the most part is still reluctant to adopt asynchronous design (with a few notable exceptions) due to a common belief that we still lack a commercial-quality Electronic Design Automation tools (similar to the synchronous RTL-to-GDSII flow) for asynchronous circuits. The purpose of this paper is to counteract this view by presenting design flows that can tackle large designs without significant changes with respect to synchronous design flow. We are limiting ourselves to four design flows that we believe to be closest to this goal. We start from the Tangram flow, because it is the most commercially proven and it is one of the oldest from a methodological point of view. The other three flows (Null Convention Logic, de-synchronization, and gate-level pipelining) could be considered together as asynchronous re-implementations of synchronous (RTL- or gate-level) specifications. The main common idea is substituting the global clocks by local synchronizations. Their most important aspect is to open the possibility to implement large legacy synchronous designs in an almost "push button" manner, where all asynchronous machinery is hidden, so that synchronous RTL designers do not need to be re-educated. These three flows offer a trade-off from very low overhead, almost synchronous implementations, to very high performance, extremely robust dual-rail pipelines.

In recent years, both Networks-on-Chip, as an architectural solution for high-speed interconnect, and power consumption, as a key design constraint, have continued to gain interest in the design and research communities. This book offers a single-source reference to some of the most important design techniques proposed in the context of low-power design for networks-on-chip architectures.

Welcome to the proceedings of PATMOS 2008, the 18th in a series of int- national workshops. PATMOS 2008 was organized by INESC-ID / IST - TU Lisbon, Portugal, with sponsorship by Cadence, IBM, Chipidea, and Tecmic, and technical co-sponsorship by the IEEE. Over the years, PATMOS has evolved into an important European event, where researchers from both industry and academia discuss and investigate the emerging challenges in future and contemporary applications, design meth- ologies, and tools required for the development of the upcoming generations of integrated circuits and systems. The technical program of PATMOS 2008 c- tained state-of-the-art technical contributions, three invited talks, and a special session on recon?gurable architectures. The technical program focused on t- ing, performance and power consumption, as well as architectural aspects with particular emphasis on modeling, design, characterization, analysis and op- mization in the nanometer era. The Technical Program Committee, with the assistance of additional expert reviewers, selected the 41 papers presented at PATMOS. The papers were - ganized into 7 oral sessions (with a total of 31 papers) and 2 poster sessions (with a total of 10 papers). As is customary for the PATMOS workshops, full papers were required for review, and a minimum of three reviews were received per manuscript.

With asynchronous circuit design becoming a powerful tool in thedevelopment of new digital systems, circuit designers are expectedto have asynchronous design skills and be able to leverage them toreduce power consumption and increase system speed. This book walksreaders through all of the different methodologies of asynchronouscircuit design, emphasizing practical techniques and real-worldapplications instead of theoretical simulation. The only guide ofits kind, it also features an ftp site complete with supportmaterials. Market: Electrical Engineers, Computer Scientists, DeviceDesigners, and Developers in industry. An Instructor Support FTP site is available from the Wileyeditorial department.

Create low power, higher performance circuits with shorter design times using this practical guide to asynchronous design. This practical alternative to conventional synchronous design enables performance close to full-custom designs with design times that approach commercially available ASIC standard cell flows. It includes design trade-offs, specific design examples, and end-of-chapter exercises. Emphasis throughout is placed on practical techniques and real-world applications, making this ideal for circuit design students interested in alternative design styles and system-on-chip circuits, as well as circuit designers in industry who need new solutions to old problems.

As the costs of power and timing become increasingly difficult to manage in traditional synchronous systems, designers are being forced to look at asynchronous alternatives. Based on reworked and expanded papers from the VII Banff Higher Order Workshop, this volume examines asynchronous methods which have been used in large circuit design, ranging from initial formal specification to more standard finite state machine based control models. Written by leading practitioners in the area, the papers cover many aspects of current practice including practical design, silicon compilation, and applications of formal specification. It also includes a state-of-the-art survey of asynchronous hardware design. The resulting volume will be invaluable to anyone interested in designing correct asynchronous circuits which exhibit high performance or low power operation.

The first of two volumes in the Electronic Design Automation for Integrated Circuits Handbook, Second Edition, Electronic Design Automation for IC System Design, Verification, and Testing thoroughly examines system-level design, microarchitectural design, logic verification, and testing. Chapters contributed by leading experts authoritatively discuss processor modeling and design tools, using performance metrics to select microprocessor cores for integrated circuit (IC) designs, design and verification languages, digital simulation, hardware acceleration and emulation, and much more. New to This Edition: Major updates appearing in the initial phases of the design flow, where the level of abstraction keeps rising to support more functionality with lower non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs Significant revisions reflected in the final phases of the design flow, where the complexity due to smaller and smaller geometries is compounded by the slow progress of shorter wavelength lithography New coverage of cutting-edge applications and approaches realized in the decade since publication of the previous edition—these are illustrated by new chapters on high-level synthesis, system-on-chip (SoC) block-based design, and back-annotating system-level models Offering improved depth and modernity, Electronic Design Automation for IC System Design, Verification, and Testing provides a valuable, state-of-the-art reference for electronic design automation (EDA) students, researchers, and professionals.

This book commemorates the work done by Tony Hoare and published under the title Communicating Sequential Processes in the 1978 August issue of the Communications of ACM. The British Computer Society's specialist group Formal Aspects of Computing Science organized a meeting on July 7-8, 2004, in London, to mark the occasion of 25 years of CSP. The 19 carefully reviewed and revised full papers by leading researchers celebrate, reflect upon, and look beyond the first quarter-century of CSP's contributions to computer science. The papers explore the impact of CSP on many areas ranging from semantics and logic, through the design of parallel programming languages to applications varying from distributed software and parallel computing to information security, Web services, and concurrent hardware circuits.