Practical Timing Analysis of Asynchronous Systems Using Time Separation of Events

We present a unified technique for timing verification and performance analysis of complex asynchronous systems designed with implicit timing assumptions. Our method models interacting controllers and datapath elements using timing constraint graphs. Performance metrics and timing constraints to be verified are formulated as time separations between appropriate events. Separations between all relevant pairs of events are computed in a single pass using an efficient time separation of events algorithm [2]. A complete asynchronous differential equation solver chip [16] has been modeled and analyzed using the techniques presented in this paper. We present results of datapath timing verification, inter-controller protocol timing verification and performance analysis of the differential equation solver using our techniques.