AUTOMATIC SYNTHESIS OF GATE-LEVEL SPEED-INDEPENDENT CIRCUITS

This paper presents a CAD tool for the synthesis of robust asynchronous control circuits using limited-fanin basic gates such as AND gates, OR gates, and C-elements. The synthesized circuits are speed-independent; that is, they work correctly regardless of individual gate delays. Included in our synthesis procedure is an efficient procedure for logic optimizations using observability don’t cares and incremental verifcation. We apply the procedure to a variety of specifications taken from industry and previously published examples and compare our speed-independent implementations to those generated using a non-speed-independent synthesis procedure included in Berkeley’s SIS. Our implementations are not only more robust to delay variations since those produced by SIS rely on bounded delay lines to avoid circuit hazards but also are on average 13% faster with an area penalty of only 14%.

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