Function abstraction in automatic digital-circuit design

A novel approach for automating the functional design of digital circuits is presented. The goal of digital-circuit design is to generate a workable and efficient design from high-level specifications. Function abstraction is an important step, whereas the specification of the target circuit is purely behavioural. It finds the essential functions of the desired behaviour. These functions can then be easily bound to physical modules. The design space for a behavioural description is huge. Therefore, it is important to have a powerful search strategy which will lead to a near optimum solution in reasonable time. The authors use the heuristic best-first search and meta-planning techniques to control the decision-making and optimise the final design. Experimental results are presented to compare the effectiveness of these search strategies.