IBAW: an implication-tree based alternative-wiring logic transformation algorithm

The well-known ATPG-based alternative wiring technique, RAMBO, has been shown to be very useful because of its proven powerfulness and flexibility in attacking many design automation problems (e.g. logic optimization, circuit partitioning, and post-layout logic transformation, etc.). Since the ATPG based alternative wire locating procedure is the center engine for all its applications, speeding up of this process should be very crucial and useful, We observe that the bottleneck of the technique lies in the costly redundancy tests among a large number of candidate alternative wires. In this paper, we develop a so-called implication-tree data structure which stores the implication relationship between nodes with determined logic values, and propose a new ATPG-based alternative-wiring algorithm to speed up the engine. The algorithm, Implication-tree Based Alternative-Wiring (IBAW), differs from other ATPG-based algorithms in terms that it selects the source node of alternative wires from the implication-tree, which makes IBAW able to trim out many unnecessary redundancy checking quite easily without calling for complicated procedures. Hence, it produces a steady speeding up of around 3.6 times faster while maintaining the same rewiring capability of the original RAMBO. Our experimental results show that the overall circuit area optimized by IBAW can be slightly better than that by RAMBO, while the runtime is just one-half of the latter.