Another Glance at Relay Stations in Latency-Insensitive Design
Julien Boucaron, Jean-Vivien Millo, Robert de Simone · Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science · 2006
We revisit the formal modeling of relay stations , which are specific connection elements used in the theory of Latency-Insensitive Design of Globally-Asynchronous/Locally-Synchronous systems. Relay stations are in charge of taking into account the physical mandatory latencies, while handling the regulation of signal/data traffic so as to avoid starvation, deadlock and congestion of local IP synchronous computation blocks. Since proposed by Carloni et al , the structure and behaviors of these relay stations have been amply characterized and analyzed. But previous works did not provide a fully formal and cycle-accurate description of these mechanisms, amenable to formal verification for instance (instead, mainly simulation models were developed). Due to the needed precision of the whole scheme we feel such a formal description might be needed. We describe such an attempt here.