Browsing by Author "Zeng, Kevin"

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    Enhancing Productivity with Back-End Similarity Matching of Digital Circuits for IP Reuse
    Zeng, Kevin (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-04)
    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.
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    An Exploration of Circuit Similarity for Discovering and Predicting Reusable Hardware
    Zeng, Kevin (Virginia Tech, 2016-04-27)
    A modular reuse-based design methodology has been one of the most important factors in improving hardware design productivity. Traditionally, reuse involves manually searching through repositories for existing components. This search can be tedious and often unfruitful. In order to enhance design reuse, an automated discovery technique is proposed: a reference circuit is compared with an archive of existing designs such that similar circuits are suggested throughout the design phase. To achieve this goal, methods for assessing the similarity of two designs are necessary. Different techniques for comparing the similarity of circuits are explored utilizing concepts from different domains. A new similarity measure was developed using birthmarks that allows for fast and efficient comparison of large and complex designs. Applications where circuit similarity matching can be utilized are examined such as IP theft detection and reverse engineering. Productivity experiments show that automatically suggesting reusable designs to the user could potentially increase productivity by more than 34% on average.