U.S.-Japan Cooperative Science: Synthesis and Verification of High Performance Timed Circuits and Systems

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

0087281 Myers This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Chris Myers of the University of Utah and Professor Tomohiro Yonder of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. The researchers will be undertaking a study of synthesis and verification of high performance timed circuits and systems. In order to continue to produce circuits of increasing speeds, designers are considering aggressive circuit design styles such as self-resetting or delayed-reset domino circuits. These design styles can achieve a significant improvement in circuit speed as demonstrated by their use in a gigahertz research microprocessor d(guTS) at IBM. Designers are also considering asynchronous circuits due to potential higher performance and lower power as demonstrated by the RAPPID instruction length decoder designed at Intel. This design was three times faster while using only half the power of the synchronous design. These new timed circuit styles, however, cannot be efficently and accurately analyzed using traditional static timing analysis methods. This lack of analysis tools is one of the reasons for the lack of mainstream acceptance of these design styles. The collaborators aim to develop practical tools for the synthesis and verification of timed circuit design styles. They will plan to unify the best aspects, from both groups of researchers, of their analysis and verification methodologies and then plan to develop techniques for the synthesis and verification of industrial-scale systems. These systems will include a combination of both datapath and control circuits. They will develop methods using automated abstraction in which datapath components will be verified partially and control parts completely. They will then use hierarchical information to determine how the abstraction is to be performed. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. This research advances international human resources through the participation of a graduate student. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings.