A q-gram birthmarking approach to predicting reusable hardware

Designer productivity is a growing concern as over-all hardware complexity rises. Design reuse, a key component in productivity, is underutilized. Not only can existing designs be reused, but also the patterns and information contained within them as well. With the increase in the number of circuits available, there requires a need to analyze and retrieve designs with ease in order to accelerate design entry. In this paper, a birthmarking approach using q-grams is presented. Using this technique, design patterns regarding existing circuits can be captured and used to not only suggest similar and reusable designs, but functional blocks throughout the design phase, with little to no effort from the user. Preliminary experiments and case studies of the q-gram birthmarking technique were performed on over 250 circuits from various sources in order to show the feasibility of the proposed methods.