Extracting functional modules from flattened gate-level netlist

A generic and highly versatile method for extracting functional modules from a flattened gate-level netlist is proposed. The proposed method requires no prior knowledge about the netlist under analysis and is applicable to circuits targeting diverse applications. It is fully automated and employs a highly compact module library containing only single generic model for each common function type with arbitrary data width. Experiment results depict the efficacy of the proposed method and its embodied techniques.