Finite state machine partitioning for I/O-limited design

We proposed a Finite State Machine (FSM) partitioning procedure for minimizing the number of inputs/outputs of FSMs. The FSM partition is obtained by partitioning the set of transitions that describe the behavior of an FSM. An extended FM-based graph partitioning algorithm is applied for transition partitioning. We also devise a state information minimization technique to further reduce the number of interconnections between the FSMs required for communication. Experimental results for MCNC benchmarks show that our algorithm has favorable results over circuit partitioning algorithms on the netlist level.