Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Alex Chan, Dr Danil Sokolov, Dr Victor Khomenko, Professor David Lloyd, Professor Alex Yakovlev
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2022.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
Burst-Mode (BM) formalism is a variant of an asynchronous Finite State Machine (FSM) that operates in ‘burst-mode’ timing assumption and offers simple entry into asynchronous circuit design.However, some of BM’s well-formedness properties, while useful for implementing BM specifications as circuits, are rather restrictive in some important contexts e.g. BM’s maximal set property (or its analog, Extended Burst-Mode (XBM) formalism’s distinguishability constraint) forbids non-deterministic specifications that are inherent in some design approaches, input and output bursts must alternate meaning BMs are not a proper extension of FSMs with arcs labelled by single events, and BMs cannot express input-output concurrency whereas FSMs can with interleaving. The latter limitation is particularly problematic when interoperability between several formalisms is desirable.In this paper, we propose the Burst Automation (BA) model that is more powerful and yet simpler than BM, by relaxing BM’s well-formedness properties. BA is a proper extension of FSMs, and can express input-output concurrency and non-determinism. We define BA’s interleaving semantics via its asynchronous reachability graph that is an FSM, and develop three translations from BAs to Signal Transition Graphs (STGs) that preserve strong bisimulation, weak bisimulation, or the language. Former two translations may be exponential, whereas latter translation is linear. The resulting STG can then be used for verification and synthesis into Speed-Independent (SI) or Quasi-Delay-Insensitive (QDI) circuits, or for composition with other STGs.The proposed workflow was implemented in WORKCRAFT, and experimental results show an improved synthesis rate and a significant reduction in the literal count.
Author(s): Chan A, Sokolov D, Khomenko V, Lloyd D, Yakovlev A
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)
Year: 2022
Volume: 42
Issue: 5
Pages: 1560-1573
Print publication date: 01/05/2023
Online publication date: 14/09/2022
Acceptance date: 06/09/2022
Date deposited: 29/09/2022
ISSN (print): 0278-0070
ISSN (electronic): 1937-4151
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2022.3206732
DOI: 10.1109/TCAD.2022.3206732
ePrints DOI: 10.57711/3cj0-4488
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
