Checking delay-insensitivity: 10(4) gates and beyond

Wire and gate delays are accounted to have equal, or nearly equal, effect on circuit behavior in modern design techniques. This paper introduces a new approach to verify circuits whose behavior is independent of component delays (delay-insensitive). It shows that for a particular way of implementing a delay-insensitive circuit, through a Null Convention Logic methodology, the complexity of the verification task might be significantly reduced. This method is implemented using Satisfiability (SAT)-solvers and is successfully tested on realistic design examples having tens of thousands of gates.