Speed-Up of ASICs Derived from FPGAs by Transistor Network Synthesis Including Reordering

Abstract

This paper presents a method for speeding-up ASICs by transistor reordering. The proposed method can be applied to a variety of logic styles and transistor topologies. The rationale of the obtained gains is explained through logical effort concepts. When applied to circuits based on 4-input networks, which is the case of many structured-ASIC or FPGA technologies, significant performance gains are obtained at a small area expense. This observation points out that our method can be of special interest when migrating FPGAs to ASICs. The logical effort effects on networks derived from BDDs illustrated in this paper can be exploited in a much broader range of designs.