Distributed Simulation of Asynchronous Hardware: The Program Driven Synchronization Protocol
✍ Scribed by Georgios K. Theodoropoulos
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2002
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 507 KB
- Volume
- 62
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0743-7315
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✦ Synopsis
Synchronous VLSI design is approaching a critical point, with clock distribution becoming an increasingly costly and complicated issue and power consumption rapidly emerging as a major concern. Hence, recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in asynchronous digital design techniques which promise to liberate digital design from the inherent problems of synchronous systems. This activity has revealed a need for modelling and simulation techniques suitable for the asynchronous design style. The concurrent process algebra Communication Sequential Processes (CSP) and its executable counterpart, occam, are increasingly advocated as particularly suitable for this purpose. However, the parallel distributed semantics of CSP and occam introduce synchronization problems in the model. This paper presents the Program Driven Synchronization Protocol, which seeks to address causality and synchronization problems and enforce temporal coherency in distributed CSP/ occam models of asynchronous hardware systems.