A generalized control-flow-aware pattern recognition algorithm for behavioral synthesis

Pattern recognition has many applications in design automation. A generalized pattern recognition algorithm is presented in this paper which can efficiently extract similar patterns in programs. Compared to previous pattern-based techniques, our approach overcomes their limitation in handling control-flow-aware patterns, and leads to more opportunities for optimization. Our algorithm uses a feature-based filtering approach for fast pruning, and an elegant graph similarity metric called the generalized edit distance for measuring variations in CDFGs. Furthermore, our pattern recognition algorithm is applied to solve the area optimization problem in behavioral synthesis. Our experimental results show up to a 40% area reduction on a set of real-world benchmarks with a moderate 9% latency overhead, compared to synthesis results without pattern extractions; and up to a 30% area reduction, compared to the results using only data-flow patterns.