Deadlock Analysis in the Design of Data-Flow Circuits

One means of making VLSI design tractable is to proceed from a high-level specification of a circuit in terms of functionality, to the circuit level. A notable error which may occur in a topdown design starting with a data-flow graph representation of a circuit is a design inconsistency due to deadlock. This paper attempts to further develop the theoretical basis for algorithms which analyze the deadlock property of circuits on the basis of their data-flow graph representations. A systematic scheme to verify the absence of deadlock in data-flow graphs is also presented.