Unified (A)Synchronous Circuit Development

Abstract

Despite its development several decades ago and several very beneficial properties asynchronous logic design, which is data driven and runs as fast as possible in all situations, is rarely used nowadays. Reasons are of course its disadvantageous properties such as bad testability but also required sophisticated knowledge for designers and missing tools. In this paper we draw a path to tackle the latter points by suggesting a tool/way to generate multiple circuit implementations from a single description. We are aiming to convert specifications written in various input languages, e.g. C or VHDL, to an unified Internal Representation (IR). This IR is composed of building blocks (semantic vocabulary) specified through the Abstract State Machine (ASM) based formal method. The ASM artifact is then used to generate the circuit in the desired (a)synchronous design style. As short term goal we aim to train developers by reading synchronous descriptions and converting them to asynchronous designs however in the long run we hope to establish a unified path for circuit development, which only requires an abstract behavioral description.