Fast and compact sequential circuits for the FPGA-based reconfigurable systems

Reconfigurable systems fill the flexibility, performance, power dissipation, and development and fabrication cost gap between the application specific systems implemented with hard-wired application specific integrated circuits and systems based on the standard (general purpose) programmable microprocessors. During the last decade they became the mainstream implementation technology for custom computation and embedded system products in such fields as telecommunication, image processing, video processing, multimedia, DSP, cryptography, embedded control, etc. To efficiently develop, implement and use the reconfigurable systems, adequate computer-aided support tools are necessary. Since most reconfigurable systems are implemented using the look-up table (LUT) field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) technology, the circuit synthesis tools targeting this technology are of primary importance for their effective and efficient implementation. In this paper, a new sequential circuit synthesis methodology is discussed that targets LUT FPGAs and FPGA-based reconfigurable system-on-a-chip platforms. The methodology is based on the information-driven approach to circuit synthesis, general decomposition and theory of information relationship measures that we previously developed. Our synthesis methods considerably differ from all other known methods. The experimental results from the automatic circuit synthesis tools that implement our methods demonstrate that the information-driven approach consistently applied in the whole sequential circuit synthesis chain efficiently produces very fast and compact sequential circuits.