Enhancing productivity with back-end similarity matching of digital circuits for IP reuse

Abstract

(ABSTRACT)Productivity for digital circuit design is being outpaced currently by the rate at which silicon is growing such as FPGAs. Complex designs take a large amount of engineering hours to complete. Reuse of existing design can potentially decrease this cost and increase design productivity. However, existing digital hardware designs are not being effectively reused by the hardware community due to the inability of designers to have knowledge of all the attributes of designs that can be reused. In addition, designers will have to accustom themselves to designs in the hardware library. By having a back-end system that looks for similar circuits, there is little to no effort for the designer to reuse the design. This thesis provides an overview and comparison of different methods for characterizing and comparing digital circuits in order to suggest candidate circuits that engineers can reuse. Several of these methods are implemented, modified, and compared to show the feasibility of utilizing this work for increasing overall productivity.