Discovering Reusable Hardware Using Birthmarking Techniques

With decades of investments, productivity has still continued to be a major issue for many digital circuit designers. One of the most important factors in improving productivity is design reuse, which current tools have yet to fully exploit. Reusing designs involve manually searching through repositories to find a design that meets the requirements of a project. This search can be tedious and often unfruitful. In order to promote 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, however, most circuit comparison techniques are focused on exact matches. In this paper, a method of comparing the similarity of circuits using a birthmarking technique is presented. The birthmarking technique captures a wide range of features including structural characteristics, such as components and nets, and functional characteristics, such as dataflow, into a single compact representation. Experiments and evaluations of the birthmarking technique were performed on over 150 circuits from various sources in order to show the feasibility of the proposed methods. Results show that using birthmarks to compare the similarity of circuits is promising.