Decomposition of Speed-Independent Circuits

Logic decomposition is a well-known problem in logic synthesis, but it poses new challenges when targeted to speed-independent circuits. The decomposition of a gate into smaller gates must preserve not only the functional correctness of a circuit but also speed-independence, i.e. hazard-freedom under unbounded gate delays. This paper presents a new method for logic decomposition of speed-independent circuits that solves the problem in two major steps: 1) logic decomposition of complex gates and 2) insertion of new signals that preserve hazardfreedom. The method is shown to be more general than previous approaches and its effectiveness is evaluated by experiments on a set of benchmarks.