A comparison of functional and structural partitioning

Incorporating functional partitioning into a synthesis methodology leads to several important advantages. In functional partitioning, we first partition a functional specification into smaller sub-specifications and then synthesize structure for each, in contrast to the current approach of first synthesizing structure for the entire specification and then partitioning that structure. One advantage is that of greatly improved partitioning among a given set of packages with size and I/O constraints, such as FPGAs or ASIC blocks, resulting in better performance and far fewer required packages. A second advantage is that of greatly reduced synthesis runtimes. We present results of experiments demonstrating these important advantages, leading to the conclusion that further research focus on functional partitioning can lead to improved quality and practicality of synthesis environments.