tom@wucs.UUCP (Tom Chaney) (10/10/85)
In net.arch appeared a note on Metastablity asking about manufacturer's specs, specifically for 74S74 data, asking for a better definition of a "zillion", and containing the following relating to the problem: > The academics, as usual, are silent about the problem as it is just > something messy to do with producing working equipment, and therefore > totally uninteresting. > (by paul@dual.UUCP (Baker)) Will now, I beg to differ. I could respond by attaching a copy of my reference list (it is over 80 references) of work reported on the metastable problem, done in large part by "ACADEMIC" types. This note would run on for pages! I do not, and I do not think the rest of the academic community find problems that have to do with producing working equipment "uninteresting". Data on the metastable response of several different types of latchs, including data on 74S74's, has been published. (see my note in the IEEETC, Dec. 1983, pp1207-09) The academic community has been publishing for a while. There are even BOOKS out, not just papers. Gray (Digital Computer Engineering, Prentice Hall, **1963**) has a section on the problem (pages 198-201) and Mead and Conway (Introduction to VLSI Systems, Addison-Wesley, 1980) includes latch marginal triggering discussions in several places. There have been papers in the literature on proofs that there must be a synchronizer problem, papers that deal with circuits, papers on characterizing the latch performance under marginal triggering, and papers that present asynchronous systems which can be designed to not proceed until all synchronizer elements have resolved (including an IBM owned patent by Adams, Castraldo, and Kurz, June 1970, No. 3,515,998 and our Macromodule work of about that period up to resent work on asynchronous systems, for example, see 1985 Chapel Hill Conference on VLSI proceedings, Computer Science Press, pages 67-86). My reference list a available to any who are interested. You just have to ask. Tom Chaney, Institute of Biomedical Computing, Computer Systems Lab., Washington University, 724 S. Euclid Ave. St. Louis, MO, 63110. -Tom-