Race detection for two-phase systems

Author

Grodstein, J. ; Montanaro, J. ; Marino, S.

Author_Institution

Digital Equipment Corp., Hudson, MA, USA

fYear

1990

fDate

11-15 Nov. 1990

Firstpage

20

Lastpage

23

Abstract

The authors present RACE2, a tool to find latch race-through in two-phase, non-underlapped-clock systems. Though these systems can run at very high clock speeds, susceptibility to race-through has made them difficult to design. RACE2, by detecting all race-through violations, greatly reduces the design risk on these very fast systems. It combines the exhaustive search of a pattern-independent tool with a knowledge base of fundamental principles about when races are-and are not-important. Planned enhancements include detection of saved-state races, detection of charge-share races, improved robustness, and better pruning methods for faster worst-case runtimes. For pieces of a large two-phase full-custom chip, CPU execution times are in minutes, seconds on a VAX-8800. To date, RACE2 has found five races in the chip, all of which were undetected by design reviews and logic simulation.<>

Keywords

logic CAD; logic circuits; logic testing; RACE2; knowledge base; latch race-through; logic simulation; pattern-independent tool; pruning methods; saved-state races; two-phase systems; worst-case runtimes; Circuit synthesis; Clocks; Control systems; Delay; Feeds; Latches; Logic; Routing; System performance; Timing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer-Aided Design, 1990. ICCAD-90. Digest of Technical Papers., 1990 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Santa Clara, CA, USA

Print_ISBN

0-8186-2055-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCAD.1990.129829

Filename

129829