Communications of the ACM
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Speed-independent circuit design is of increasing interest because of global timing problems in VLSI. Unfortunately, speed-independent design is very subtle. We propose the use of state-machine verification tools to ameliorate this problem. This paper illustrates issues in the modelling, specification, and verification of speed-independent circuits through consideration of self-timed queues. User-level specifications are given as Petri nets, which are translated into trace structures for automatic processing. Three different implementations of queues are considered: a chain of queue cells, two parallel chains, and "circular buffer" example using a separate RAM.