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
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.