Asynchronous systems
The research in this area is being carried out by a broad international cooperation that has produced successful results during the last 12 years. The main goal is to understand, design and build synthesis tools for circuits that do not have clocks. Most of the effort has been done at the level of logic gates and is covered by a book:
J. Cortadella, M. Kishinevsky, A. Kondratyev, L. Lavagno and A. Yakovlev,
Logic synthesis of asynchronous controllers and interfaces,
Springer-Verlag, 2002.
The most tangible result of this cooperation is
petrify, a tool
for the synthesis of asynchronous controllers from Signal Transition
Graphs. It is currently used by many groups in academia and industry
for research and design.
The current research is devoted to bridging the gap between
designers and asynchronous circuits. In particular, we seek to build
tools for large control circuits and for the automatic synthesis of
asynchronous circuits from synchronous netlists. An example is the
paper that deserved the best paper award at the ASYNC
2004:
I. Blunno, J. Cortadella, A. Kondratyev, L. Lavagno, K. Lwin and C. Sotiriou,
Handshake protocols for de-synchronization,
Proc. of the Int. Symp. on Advanced Research in Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC), Crete, April 2004.
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