The problem of representing timing information associated with functions in a dataflow graph is considered. This information is used for constraint analysis during behavioral synthesis of appropriate architectures for implementing the graph. Conventional models for timing suffer from shortcomings that make it difficult to represent timing information in a hierarchical manner for sequential and multirate systems. Some of these shortcomings are identified, and an alternate timing model that does not have these problems for hardware implementations is provided. We introduce the concept of timing pairs to model delay elements in sequential and multirate circuits and show how this allows us to derive hierarchical timing information for complex circuits. The resulting compact representation of the timing information can be used to streamline system performance analysis. In addition, several analytical results that previously applied only to single rate systems can now be extended to multirate systems. We present an algorithm to compute the timing parameters and have used this to compute timing parameters for a number of benchmark circuits. The results obtained on several ISCAS benchmark circuits as well as several multirate dataflow graphs corresponding to useful signal processing applications are presented. These results show that the new representation model can result in large reductions in the amount of information required to represent timing for hierarchical systems.