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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