An Event Spacing Experiment

Events in self-timed rings can propagate evenly spaced or as bursts. By studying these phenomena, we obtain a better understanding of the underlying dynamics of self-timed pipelines, which is a necessary precursor to utilizing these dynamics to obtain higher performance (see, e.g., [18]). We show that standard bounded delay models are inadequate to discriminate between bursting and evenly spaced behaviours and show that an extension of the Charlie Diagrams of [5] provides a framework for understanding these phenomena. This paper describes our novel analytical approaches and the design and fabrication of a chip to test our theoretical models.