Timing analysis of asynchronous systems using time separation of events

This paper describes a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for timing analysis of a class of choice-free asynchronous systems, called tightly coupled systems, with both min- and max-type timing constraints and bounded component delays. The algorithm consists of two phases: (1) long-term behavior analysis, that computes bounds on the time separation of events after the system has run for a sufficiently long period of time, and (2) startup behavior analysis, that computes time separations between events during an initial startup period after the system is powered up. The results of the analysis are conservative in the worst case; nevertheless, they are found to be exact in our experiments. To demonstrate the practical utility of the approach, an asynchronous differential equation solver chip has been modeled and analyzed using the proposed algorithm. We report results of datapath timing verification, intercontroller protocol timing verification and performance analysis of the chip using the proposed technique.