Axioms for memory access in asynchronous hardware systems

  • Authors:
  • J. Misra

  • Affiliations:
  • The Univ. of Texas at Austin, Austin

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) - The MIT Press scientific computation series
  • Year:
  • 1986

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The problem of concurrent accesses to registers by asynchronous components is considered. A set of axioms about the values in a register during concurrent accesses is proposed. It is shown that if these axioms are met by a register, then concurrent accesses to it may be viewed as nonconcurrent, thus making it possible to analyze asynchronous algorithms without elaborate timing analysis of operations. These axioms are shown, in a certain sense, to be the weakest. Motivation for this work came from analyzing low-level hardware components in a VLSI chip which concurrently accesses a flip-flop.