Parallel Program and Asynchronous Circuit Design

Asynchronous circuit design is a beautiful application area for any formalism that can reason about parallelism By means of two small but challenging exercises we illustrate the similarities and di erences between parallel program and asynchronous circuit design The exercises are simple to state and have many solutions which are sometimes surprisingly e cient They all illustrate many aspects of asynchronous circuit design For each exercise we present several solutions which are analyzed with respect to delay assumptions safety progress and performance issues We also mention some open problems This work is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada under grant OGP and by a grant from the Information Technology Research Centre of Ontario These notes are a revision of the lectures presented at the BANFF VII Workshop on Asynchronous Hardware Design August Sept Ebergen Segers Benko