Computing Synchronizer Failure Probabilities

Suwen Yang and Mark R. Greenstreet
10th Design, Automation and Test Europe Conference (DATE'2007)

Communication between these domains requires synchronization, and the failure probabilities of these synchronizers must be characterized accurately to ensure the robustness of the complete system. We present a novel approach for determining the failure probabilities of synchronizer circuits. Our approach using numerical integration to account for the non-linear behaviour of real synchronizer circuits. We complement this with small-signal techniques to enable accurate estimation of extremely small failure probabilities. Our approach is fully automated, is suitable for integration into circuit simulation tools such as \textsc{SPICE} and enables accurate characterization of extremely small failure probabilities. \end{abstract}