Decomposition of Delay-Insensitive Circuits

摘要

The paper is mainly a critique on the fundamental definitions in Ebergen's work on the design of delay-insensitive circuits. It consists of two parts. The first part discusses Ebergen's definition of decomposition. On the one hand, Ebergen's definition is too strict, since it does not allow one to exploit nondeterminism in the production of outputs. On the other hand, decompositions may still suffer from deadlock and livelock. The second part discusses DI decomposition. Ebergen gives two definitions of DI decomposition that are not equivalent. Moreover, the name incorrectly suggests that DI decomposition is a special form of decomposition. The paper carefully analyzes Ebergen's definitions. The analysis yields some interesting new theorems and clearly identifies 'poor modeling of liveness' as major cause for the deficiencies. The paper does not, however, propose any new solutions to the underlying problem.