Bisynchronous FIFOs and the FITO Category Mistake: Silicon-Proven Interaction Primitives for Distributed Coordination

TL;DR

This paper reviews the history and effectiveness of bisynchronous FIFOs in hardware for distributed coordination, challenging the reliance on timestamp-based synchronization in modern protocols by emphasizing handshake primitives.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of bisynchronous FIFO designs and argues for replacing timestamp-based methods with interaction primitives like handshakes for distributed coordination.

Findings

Bisynchronous FIFOs are silicon-proven and effective for data transfer across clock domains.

Interaction primitives can replace timestamp-based synchronization in distributed systems.

Handshake-based coordination undermines the FITO assumption in protocols like PTP and TSN.

Abstract

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.