An Approach to Checking SOC Timing Safety

High-performance SOCs (system on a chip) are being widely used in multimedia signal processing. Timing behavior is a critical issue in high-performance design, and one of the significant and challenging problems in the SOC design is to ensure the safety of timing behavior. A model that combines Allen-Givone algebra in multi-valued logic and the waveform polynomial is presented in this paper. Functional and timing behavior can be precisely described simultaneously by one unified representation, allowing inputs and outputs of a multi-valued logic function to be described by multi-valued waveforms, which are consistent with commonly used intuitive waveforms. This method is applicable in precisely analyzing and checking the correctness and safety of SOC timing attributes.