Zeng, Kevin2013-06-052013-06-052013-06-04vt_gsexam:1244http://hdl.handle.net/10919/23144Productivity 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 />ETDIn CopyrightField programmable gate arraysProductivityDigital CircuitsGraph MatchingSimilarityIP ReuseThesis