Logic Synthesis of Handshake Components Using Structural Clustering Techniques

A methodology to optimize handshake circuits is presented. The approach selects clusters of a handshake network for which signals representing internal channels within a cluster are hidden. To guarantee asynchronous implementability on the resulting cluster, state encoding is applied using modern structural techniques. The theory of Petri nets is used to identify clusters for which the structural techniques perform successfully. Finally logic synthesis is employed for each reencoded cluster. The approach is integrated into the Balsa synthesis flow and represent a significant improvement with respect to the local optimizations typically applied. Experimental results in area and performance have been obtained to measure the optimization on typical Balsa examples.

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