A signature based approach to regularity extraction

Regularity extraction is an important step in the design flow of datapath-dominated circuits. This paper outlines a new method that automatically extracts regular structures from the netlist. The method is general enough to handle two types of designs: designs with structured cluster information for a portion of the datapath components that are identified at the HDL level; and designs with no such structured cluster information. The method analyzes the circuit connectivity and uses signature based approaches to recognize regularity.