@ARTICLE\{IMM2007-05059, author = "S. F. Nielsen and J. Spars{\o} and J. Madsen", title = "Behavioral synthesis of asynchronous circuits using syntax directed compilation as backend", year = "2007", journal = "{IEEE} Transaction on {VLSI} Systems", volume = "", editor = "", number = "", publisher = "", url = "http://www2.compute.dtu.dk/pubdb/pubs/5059-full.html", abstract = "This paper presents a method for behavioral synthesis of asynchronous circuits which is very similar to what is found in existing synchronous design tools: (i) extraction of a {CDFG,} (ii) scheduling, allocation and binding, and (iii) generation of a datapath and a controller. The novelty is our approach used for enabling standard behavioral synthesis algorithms to be used in continous time and the way in we describe and generate the datapath and the controller using Balsa, an existing asynchronous synthesis tool based on syntax directed compilation. Our approach has several advantages: it provides synthesis from a higher level of abstraction, it leverages on an existing tool flow for generating and optimizing circuit level implementations, and it generates the controller as a structure of handshake components, thus avoiding the problems related to synthesizing a single and often very complex controller; a problem experienced in several other approaches. The paper presents the different steps of the synthesis method using a single running example. The paper also reports on area, speed and power figures for a range of benchmark circuits, of which a couple have been synthesized to layout." }