2022 CAD Contest Problem A: Learning Arithmetic Operations from Gate-Level Circuit

Abstract

Extracting circuit functionality from a gate-level netlist is critical in CAD tools. For security, it helps designers to detect hardware Trojans or malicious design changes in the netlist with third-party resources such as fabrication services and soft/hard IP cores. For verification, it can reduce the complexity and effort of keeping design information in aggressive optimization strategies adopted by synthesis tools. For Engineering Change Order (ECO), it can keep the designer from locating the ECO gate in a sea of bit-level gates.In this contest, we formulated a datapath learning and extraction problem. With a set of benchmarks and an evaluation metric, we expect contestants to develop a tool to learn the arithmetic equations from a synthesized gate-level netlist.