Enhancing productivity with back-end similarity matching of digital circuits for IP reuse

Productivity for digital circuit design is being outpaced by the rate at which silicon is growing. Complex designs take a significant amount of engineering hours to complete in both ASICs and FPGAs. Design reuse can potentially decrease cost and increase design productivity. The central thesis of this paper is that design productivity could be enhanced by assisting the designer in discovering archived designs in order to complete a reference circuit. An overview analyzing different methods for characterizing and comparing digital circuits is provided in order to suggest candidate circuits that engineers can reuse. A new design entry methodology is also proposed. Several of these methods are implemented, modified, and compared to show the feasibility of utilizing this work to potentially increase overall productivity for hardware design.