Taking One-to-one Mappings for Granted: Advanced Logic Design of Encoder Circuits
Alwin Zulehner1 and Robert Wille1,2
1Institute for Integrated Circuits, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria.
aalwin.zulehner@jku.at
brobert.wille@jku.at
2Cyber-Physical Systems, DFKI GmbH, Bremen, Germany
ABSTRACT
Encoders play an important role in many areas such as memory addressing, data demultiplexing, or for interconnect solutions. However, design solutions for the automatic synthesis of corresponding circuits suffer from various drawbacks, e.g. they are often not scalable, do not exploit the full degree of freedom, or are applicable to realize certain codes only. All these problems are caused by the fact that existing design solutions have to explicitly guarantee a one-to-one mapping. In this work, we propose an alternative design approach which relies on dedicated description means for both, the specification of an encoder as well as its circuit. Based on that, synthesis can be conducted without the need to explicitly take care of guaranteeing one-to-one mappings. Experiments show that this indeed overcomes the drawbacks of current design solutions and leads to an improvement in the resulting number of gates by up to 92%.
