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R. Najvirt, T. Polzer, A. Steininger:
"Measuring Metastability with Free-Running Clocks";
Talk: 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC 2017), San Diego, California; 2017-05-21 - 2017-05-24; in: "Proceedings 2017 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC 2017)", IEEE Computer Society, 10662 Los Vaqueros Circle (2017), ISBN: 978-1-5386-2749-5; Paper ID 37, 7 pages.

With the increasing number of clock domain crossings
in modern VLSI circuits, the area, power and performance
overheads introduced by synchronization have a rising impact on
the overall system parameters. To minimize these overheads while
still reaching the targeted system reliability, it is very important
to precisely know the parameters of the circuit elements used
for synchronization regarding metastability. While it is well
understood, what parameters are relevant and how they can be
derived from circuit models, obtained from simulation or even
measured, the state of the art measurement approaches require
precisely timed clock inputs. These are typically provided with
expensive test equipment, on-chip clock management blocks or
calibrated delay lines.
This paper proposes an approach for measuring metastability
parameters using uncorrelated free-running clocks only at the
expense of a more challenging post-processing. The principle
is closely related to sampling oscilloscopes with the same fundamental
property: the measurement resolution is theoretically
unbounded but proportional to the measurement time. Apart
from the description of the circuit, this paper includes an analysis
of the effect of clock uncertainty (jitter) on the measurement
result and an experimental evaluation.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ASYNC.2017.18