Enhancing Productivity with Back-End Similarity Matching of Digital Circuits for IP Reuse

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

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Zeng, Kevin

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Athanas, Peter M.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Patterson, Cameron D.
• Schaumont, Patrick R.

• Field programmable gate arrays
• Productivity
• Digital Circuits
• Graph Matching
• Similarity
• IP Reuse

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:1244

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/23144