CORRECTNESS AND REDUCTION IN TIMED CIRCUIT ANALYSIS

To increase performance, circuit designers are experimenting with timed circuits—a class of circuits that rely on a complex set of timing constraints for correct functionality. This is evidenced in published experimental designs from industry. Timing constraints are key to the success of these designs, and algorithms to verify timing constraints are required to make them practical in commercial applications. Due to the complexity of the constraints, however, traditional static timing analysis is not adequate. Timed state space analysis is required; thus, improved timed state space analysis is paramount to producing efficient timed circuits. This dissertation discusses two facets of work in timed state space analysis: correctness and reduction. For correctness, this dissertation presents the levelruled Petri net as a model for timed circuits. This model is based on the Petri net language. It includes, however, timing information and level expressions that are key to the specification and verification of timed circuits. This dissertation formalizes the intent of correctness in the verification of a timed circuit by defining a set of failure conditions that can be analyzed in the circuit’s respective model. The circuit is said to be correct if its model is failure free. For reduction, this dissertation presents a timed state space analysis algorithm that verifies correctness in the timed circuit model. The algorithm, when compared to existing algorithms, reduces on average the running time and memory footprint of analysis. A partial order reduction is implemented for the algorithm to further reduce its resource usage. This reduction is not supported by the existing algorithms; thus, the new analysis algorithm can be applied to systems that are beyond their capacity. This is demonstrated in verifying industrial designs from IBM and Sun Microsystems. To the joy of life and learning