Consistency and satisfiability of waveform timing specifications

Manufacturers often use digital waveforms to specify critical device timing. In this paper, we study two problems related to the use of such specifications. First, we are interested in verifying that the timing information is consistent to begin with. Second, given waveform specifications of two devices that are to be linked, we wish to know whether one satisfies the other’s timing requirements. We construct a model of the timing information conveyed by the waveform convention and show how both problems can be solved efficiently with optimization techniques. To illustrate our arguments, we compare the write-cycle timing of a typical CPU with that of a RAM device.