An Effective Delay Analysis System for a Large Scale Computer Design

A delay analysis system called DASP was developed. DASP was proved to be very effective to reveal delay errors in a large scale computer design with the following features. (1) It analyzes automatically the delay time of paths between all flip-flops including paths that pass through different hierarchical levels. (2) It traces paths with high speed by a modified depth first search method that was newly developed. (3) It recognizes clock signals providing useful delay analysis information for multiple clocked synchronous logic circuits. DASP was applied to develop Hitachi's high performance computer M-68X and contributed much to save its development time.