An FSM Reengineering Approach to Sequential Circuit Synthesis by State Splitting

Abstract

This paper presents a finite-state machine (FSM) reengineering method that enhances the FSM synthesis by reconstructing a functionally equivalent but topologically different FSM based on the optimization objective. This method enables the FSM synthesis algorithms to explore a set of functionally equivalent FSMs and obtain better solutions than those in the original FSM. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we apply it to popular power- and area-driven FSM synthesis algorithms, respectively. Our method achieves an average of 5.5% power reduction and 2.7% area reduction, respectively, on 25 Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) FSM benchmarks, where the proposed method is applicable. This is a significant performance improvement for the power- and area-driven FSM synthesis algorithms being used. Our method has a negligible run-time overhead, and it maintains the quality of the synthesis solutions.