Benchmarking In Electronic Design Automation

The opportunities created by modern microelectronics cannot be effectively exploited without adequate methods and EDA-tools for designing of high-quality circuits and systems. This paper focuses on benchmarking that is one of the main issues of the design method and EDA-tool development, analysis, characterization and evaluation. To resolve serious problems related to the usage of practical industrial circuit synthesis benchmarks, we developed and implemented sequential and combinational circuit generators that enable research, comparison, evaluation and fine-tuning of circuit synthesis methods and EDA-tools largely independent of the industry, and much better than having only some industrial benchmarks. Using the results of extensive experiments that involved a number of sequential circuit synthesis methods implemented in contemporary academic and commercial EDA-tools, and large sets of diverse benchmarks generated with our FSM Benchmark Generator BenGen, we discuss several crucial problems of benchmarking and demonstrate how to resolve them