A structural encoding technique for the synthesis of asynchronous circuits

Issue title: Application of Concurrency to System Design

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Carmona, Josep | Cortadella, Jordi | Pastor, Enric

Affiliations: Computer Architecture Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

Abstract: This paper presents a method for the automatic synthesis of asynchronous circuits from Petri net specifications. The method is based on a structural encoding of the system in such a way that a circuit implementation is always guaranteed. Moreover, a set of transformations is presented for the subclass of Free-Choice Petri nets that enables the exploration of different solutions. The set of transformations is derived from previous work on Petri net synthesis. Both the encoding technique and the set of transformations preserve the property of free-choiceness, thus enabling the use of structural methods for the synthesis of asynchronous circuits. Preliminary experimental results indicate that the quality of the circuits is comparable to that obtained by methods that require an exhaustive enumeration of the state space. This novel synthesis method opens the door to the synthesis of large control specifications generated from hardware description languages.

Keywords: Asynchronous circuits, Structural synthesis, Complete State Coding

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 135-154, 2002