Another glance at Relay Stations in Latency-Insensitive Designs
Abstract
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 analysed. But previous works never provided 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. On its way, this work also led us to a number of (hopefully insightful) remarks on favorable and disfavorable graph topologies and initialization features, that are also reported here.
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