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Hiroshi SAITO Alex KONDRATYEV Jordi CORTADELLA Luciano LAVAGNO Alex YAKOVLEV Takashi NANYA
Deep submicron technology calls for new design techniques, in which wire and gate delays are accounted to have equal or nearly equal effect on circuit behavior. Asynchronous speed-independent (SI) circuits, whose behavior is only robust to gate delay variations, may be too optimistic. On the other hand, building circuits totally delay-insensitive (DI), for both gates and wires, is impractical because of the lack of effective synthesis methods. The paper presents a new approach for synthesis of globally DI and locally SI circuits. The method, working in two possible design scenarios, either starts from a behavioral specification called Signal Transition Graph (STG) or from the SI implementation of the STG specification. The method locally modifies the initial model in such a way that the resultant behavior of the system does not depend on delays in the input wires. This guarantees delay-insensitivity of the system-environment interface. The suggested approach was successfully tested on a set of benchmarks. Experimental results show that DI interfacing is realized with a relatively moderate cost in area and speed (costs about 40% area penalty and 20% speed penalty).