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doctoral thesis

New Data Structures and Algorithms for Logic Synthesis and Verification

Amarù, Luca Gaetano  
2015

The strong interaction between Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools and Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology contributed substantially to the advancement of modern digital electronics. The continuous downscaling of CMOS Field Effect Transistor (FET) dimensions enabled the semiconductor industry to fabricate digital systems with higher circuit density at reduced costs. To keep pace with technology, EDA tools are challenged to handle both digital designs with growing functionality and device models of increasing complexity. Nevertheless, whereas the downscaling of CMOS technology is requiring more complex physical design models, the logic abstraction of a transistor as a switch has not changed even with the introduction of 3D FinFET technology. As a consequence, modern EDA tools are fine tuned for CMOS technology and the underlying design methodologies are based on CMOS logic primitives, i.e., negative unate logic functions. While it is clear that CMOS logic primitives will be the ultimate building blocks for digital systems in the next ten years, no evidence is provided that CMOS logic primitives are also the optimal basis for EDA software. In EDA, the efficiency of methods and tools is measured by different metrics such as (i) the result quality, for example the performance of a digital circuit, (ii) the runtime and (iii) the memory footprint on the host computer. With the aim to optimize these metrics, the accordance to a specific logic model is no longer important. Indeed, the key to the success of an EDA technique is the expressive power of the logic primitives handling and solving the problem, which determines the capability to reach better metrics. In this thesis, we investigate new logic primitives for electronic design automation tools. We improve the efficiency of logic representation, manipulation and optimization tasks by taking advantage of majority and biconditional logic primitives. We develop synthesis tools exploiting the majority and biconditional expressiveness. Our tools show strong results as compared to state-of-the-art academic and commercial synthesis tools. Indeed, we produce the best results for several public benchmarks. On top of the enhanced synthesis power, our methods are the natural and native logic abstraction for circuit design in emerging nanotechnologies, where majority and biconditional logic are the primitive gates for physical implementation. We accelerate formal methods by (i) studying properties of logic circuits and (ii) developing new frameworks for logic reasoning engines. We prove non-trivial dualities for the property checking problem in logic circuits. Our findings enable sensible speed-ups in solving circuit satisfiability. We develop an alternative Boolean satisfiability framework based on majority functions. We prove that the general problem is still intractable but we show practical restrictions that can be solved efficiently. Finally, we focus on reversible logic where we propose a new equivalence checking approach. We exploit the invertibility of computation and the functionality of reversible gates in the formulation of the problem. This enables one order of magnitude speed up, as compared to the state-of-the-art solution. We argue that new approaches to solve EDA problems are necessary, as we have reached a point of technology where keeping pace with design goals is tougher than ever.

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Type
doctoral thesis
DOI
10.5075/epfl-thesis-6863
Author(s)
Amarù, Luca Gaetano  
Advisors
De Micheli, Giovanni  
•
Burg, Andreas Peter  
Jury

Prof. Paolo Ienne (président) ; Prof. Giovanni De Micheli, Prof. Andreas Peter Burg (directeurs) ; Prof. Joseph Sifakis, Prof. Subhasish Mitra, Prof. Enrico Macii (rapporteurs)

Date Issued

2015

Publisher

EPFL

Publisher place

Lausanne

Public defense year

2015-12-18

Thesis number

6863

Total of pages

185

Subjects

electronic design automation

•

new logic primitives

•

logic synthesis

•

formal methods

EPFL units
LSI1  
Faculty
IC  
School
ISIM  
Doctoral School
EDIC  
Available on Infoscience
December 16, 2015
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/121735
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