MEAT
From: Ken Stevens (stevens@phred.cpsc.ucalgary.ca)
(Taken from the documentation (meat.doc) :)
MEAT -- The Most Excellent Asynchronous Tool, dudes!
HISTORY
This is part of a tool set that was developed here at HP Labs to help with
the development of a large 300,000 transistor asynchronous communication
chip called the Post Office. During the design of the Post Office, we
noticed that an inordinately large amount of time was spent in the process
of turning state machine specifications into implementations. Most of this
was done in a very "Unger-esque" style, and we figured could be quite
easily implemented in Software. Grinding all the minimizations through by
had was also very error prone.
Al took the challenge and made Ken a bet that within 3 weeks given a sum of
products input he could output correct asynchronous covering using a
Quine-McCluskey like algorithm. Well, he got it working, but tuning the
performance to make it efficient took several months!
Bill hacked up some code that takes a state machine specification and
generates the maximal compatibles. The user then selects the compatibles
and his code will do the state assignment and output the unreduced logic
equations. This is an Unger like reduction and uses the Tracey algorithm,
and is a front end to the asynchronous logic minimizer.
Ken hacked up a back-end to the Logic Minimization that does CMOS
transistor minimization, and generates a schematic for the circuit. This
was interfaced to the design tool we've been using called Electric(tm), and
so it hasn't been included. If you are interested, we can send you the
code that does the transistor minimization.
Steve Nowick also interfaced Bill's interface to the Asynchronous
Verification tool that is being designed at Stanford under the direction of
David Dill. (This is not included, either).
MEAT available on Ken's WWW site
http://kdstevens.com/~stevens/meat-page.html.
|
