How circuit size affects parallelism

The author addresses the issue of how well circuit parallelism scales with circuit size. Empirical studies using a single representation, switch-level, and two different timing models are presented. The results show that, in general, parallelism does not scale linearly with circuit size, and that the relationship between parallelism and circuit size is much more complex. The author first describes the simulators and methodology used to measure circuit parallelism. The circuit parallelism and percentage of parallelism of nine circuits, ranging in size from 200 to 61600 transistors, are described. Parallelism measurements from different instances of three circuit families are presented to show that, even within circuit families, relative parallelism is not constant for different instances.<
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