The Role of Causality in a Formal Definition of Timing Anomalies

Intuitively, a counter-intuitive timing anomaly manifests when a locally faster execution becomes globally slower. While the presence of such timing anomalies threatens the soundness and/or scalability of timing analyses, tools to systematically detect them do not exist. The main reason lies in the absence of a definition of counter-intuitive timing anomalies that establishes relations between local and global timing effects. In this paper, we address these relations through an important concept, that of causality, which we further use to revise the formalization of counter-intuitive timing anomalies. We also propose a specialized instance of the notions to implement a detection procedure for out-of-order pipelines.