Experiments in logic optimization

Abstract

A number of experiments have been conducted to answer several important questions about logic optimization and its application to high-level synthesis. The experiments are summarised and show that: logic optimization is competitive with manual design; stronger optimization methods give somewhat better average results (10%-30%) at much greater computational cost (8* and more); fast logic optimization methods can be used to estimate the average results of the more powerful, costly methods; and literal count is a good estimator of area before routing for standard cell designs.<>