A technique for avoiding isomorphic netlists in architectural synthesis

If interconnections have to be taken into account during architectural synthesis, functional units must be uniquely labelled in order to identify the end points of interconnections. Structures differing only by their labels are called isomorphic. One would assume that tools synthesizing netlists consider only a single representative of each set of equivalent netlists. This, however, is not true. Hence, there are cases, in which exploiting netlist isomorphism would reduce the search space. This reduction has been exploited in our OSCAR synthesis system, which uses an integer programming approach to architectural synthesis