Component selection and matching for IP-based design

Intellectual Property (IP) reuse is one of the most promising techniques addressing the design complexity problem. IP reuse assumes that pre-designed components can be integrated into the design under development, thereby reducing design complexity and time. On the other hand, as the number of IP providers increases, the selection of the best IP block for a given design becomes more challenging and time-consuming. In this paper, we present an IP component matching system targeting automatic component searching and matching across the Internet. The system is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) specification both for IP libraries (a repository of pre-designed IP components indexed by their corresponding specifications) and IP user queries (specifications with incomplete/uncertain attributes). An IP query is parsed into a document object model (DOM) and the DOM is transformed to an internal tree-structured model. Fuzzy logic scoring and aggregation algorithms are applied to the internal tree structure to provide a set of candidate approximate matches ranked by proximity between the query and IP specification