Bisynchronous FIFOs and the FITO Category Mistake: Silicon-Proven Interaction Primitives for Distributed Coordination
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866911483619704832 |
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| author | Borrill, Paul |
| author_facet | Borrill, Paul |
| contents | Bisynchronous FIFOs -- hardware buffers that mediate data transfer between independent clock domains without a shared global timebase -- have been designed, formally verified, and commercially deployed in silicon for over four decades. We survey this literature from Chapiro's 1984 GALS thesis through Cummings's Gray-code pointer techniques, Chelcea and Nowick's mixed-timing interfaces, Greenstreet's STARI protocol, and the 2015 NVIDIA pausible bisynchronous FIFO, and argue that this body of work constitutes a silicon-proven existence proof against the Forward-In-Time-Only (FITO) assumption that pervades distributed systems. The central claim is that interaction-based synchronization primitives -- handshakes, mutual exclusion, and causal flow control -- can replace timestamp-based coordination at the most demanding levels of digital engineering, directly undermining the FITO assumption in protocols such as PTP, TSN, and conventional Ethernet. We draw a structural parallel between on-chip bisynchronous coordination and the Open Atomic Ethernet (OAE) architecture, and identify the handshake -- not the timestamp -- as the fundamental primitive for coordination between independent causal domains. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_03470 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Bisynchronous FIFOs and the FITO Category Mistake: Silicon-Proven Interaction Primitives for Distributed Coordination Borrill, Paul Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Bisynchronous FIFOs -- hardware buffers that mediate data transfer between independent clock domains without a shared global timebase -- have been designed, formally verified, and commercially deployed in silicon for over four decades. We survey this literature from Chapiro's 1984 GALS thesis through Cummings's Gray-code pointer techniques, Chelcea and Nowick's mixed-timing interfaces, Greenstreet's STARI protocol, and the 2015 NVIDIA pausible bisynchronous FIFO, and argue that this body of work constitutes a silicon-proven existence proof against the Forward-In-Time-Only (FITO) assumption that pervades distributed systems. The central claim is that interaction-based synchronization primitives -- handshakes, mutual exclusion, and causal flow control -- can replace timestamp-based coordination at the most demanding levels of digital engineering, directly undermining the FITO assumption in protocols such as PTP, TSN, and conventional Ethernet. We draw a structural parallel between on-chip bisynchronous coordination and the Open Atomic Ethernet (OAE) architecture, and identify the handshake -- not the timestamp -- as the fundamental primitive for coordination between independent causal domains. |
| title | Bisynchronous FIFOs and the FITO Category Mistake: Silicon-Proven Interaction Primitives for Distributed Coordination |
| topic | Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03470 |