Formal Methods for Scheduling of Latency-Insensitive Designs.

Latency-insensitive design (LID) theory was invented to deal with SoC timing closure issues, by allowing arbitrary fixed integer latencies on long global wires. Latencies are coped with using a resynchronization protocol that performs dynamic scheduling of data transportation. Functional behavior is preserved. This dynamic scheduling is implemented using specific synchronous hardware elements: relay-stations (RS) and shell-wrappers (SW). Our first goal is to provide a formal modeling of RS and SW, that can be then formally verified. As turns out, resulting behavior is k-periodic, thus amenable to static scheduling. Our second goal is to provide formal hardware modeling here also. It initially performs throughput equalization, adding integer latencies wherever possible; residual cases require introduction of fractional registers (FRs) at specific locations. Benchmark results are presented, run on our KPASSA tool implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]