. Asynchronous circuits is a discipline in which the theory of concurrency is applied to hardware design. This paper presents an overview of a design framework in which Petri nets are used as the main behavioral model for specification. Techniques for synthesis, analysis and formal verification of asynchronous circuits are reviewed and discussed. 1 Introduction Finite State Machines has been the most traditional model of computation for sequential circuits [25, 26]. It is a state-based model in which the system, being in a state, reads some inputs, writes some outputs and moves to another state. Time is discretized by the notion of cycle, which is the time that takes the system to move from one state to another. This model is appropriate to derive circuit implementations with a periodic signal, the clock, that dictates the time instants in which the system changes state. The cycle is the finest degree of granularity at which operations are scheduled. Thus, two operations are conc..
