Formal Deadlock Verification for Click Circuits

Scalable formal verification constitutes an important challenge for the design of complicated asynchronous circuits. Deadlock freedom is a property that is desired but hard to verify. It is an emergent property that has to be verified monolithically. We propose to use Click, an existing library of asynchronous primitives, for verification. We present the automatic extraction of abstract SAT/SMT instances from circuits consisting of Click primitives. A theory is proven that opens the possibility of applying existing deadlock verification techniques for synchronous communication fabrics to asynchronous circuits.