Area Conscious State Assignment with Flip-Flop and Output Polarity Selection for Finite State Machine Synthesis--A Genetic Algorithm Approach

Abstract

This paper presents a genetic algorithm (GA)-based approach for the synthesis of a finite state machine (FSM). Three aspects---state assignment, choice of polarity for the state bits and the polarities of the primary outputs---significantly affect the cost of the combinational logic synthesized for an FSM. Thus, the problems of state assignment, flip-flop polarity selection and output polarity selection have been integrated into a single genetic algorithmic formulation. The experiments performed on a large suite of benchmarks have established the fact that this tool outperforms the existing two-level state assignment algorithms. The quality of the solution obtained and the high rate of convergence have established the effectiveness of the GA in solving this difficult problem.