Optimization of microcontrollers by partitioning

Presents a new partitioning method for finite state machines (FSMs). The method is particularly well suited for μ-controller circuits. It consists in grouping the μ-instructions of the control graph into classes according to a compatibility property of the output values. Only one sequence of output values is then generated for all μ-instructions of a given class. The resulting structure is composed of three machines: a state machine which generates the next states, a command machine and a filter machine. The command outputs and the filter outputs are merged via a logical AND to obtain the final outputs. This structure leads to an area reduction of 34% to 65% for the examples presented