Occam: An Asynchronous Hardware Description Language?
G.K. Theodoropoulos, G.K. Tsakogiannis and J.V. Woods
Abstract
Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in asynchronous
hardware due to the potential of asynchronous logic for higher
performance, power efficiency and immunity from clock-related timing
problems. This activity has revealed the current lack of suitable
languages and notations for the description of asynchronous hardware
systems and has fueled an intense research effort in this area.
Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) in particular, has attracted
the interest of many researchers as a potential means for the modelling
of asynchronous designs. Contributing to this effort, this paper
examines whether Occam, a CSP-based language may provide a solution
to this endeavour.
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