Plato: A Tool for Behavioural Specification of Asynchronous Circuits

Asynchronous circuits are becoming increasingly important in system design, where they orchestrate the interface between synchronous computation components and the analogue environment. However, wide adoption of asynchronous circuits by industrial users is hindered by a steep learning curve for asynchronous control models, such as Signal Transition Graphs, that are developed by the academic community for specification, verification and synthesis of asynchronous circuits. Previously, we have introduced a novel high-level description language for asynchronous circuits, which is based on behavioural concepts - high-level descriptions of asynchronous circuit requirements. In this paper we will discuss our open-source tool, PLATO which allows the specification of asynchronous circuits using concepts, and features the ability to automatically translate these to Signal Transition Graphs for further processing by conventional asynchronous EDA tools, such as PETRIFY and MPSAT.