BADGE - A SYNTHESIS TOOL FOR CUSTOMIZED ARITHMETIC BUILDING-BLOCKS

Arithmetic building blocks are frequently needed in the design of digital circuits especially in the area of DSP. In order to automate their design standard logic synthesis tools cannot be used because the synthesized circuits are too huge compared to those produced with simple generators. Generators in turn create a fixed circuit structure which cannot be customized to a given specification. This paper presents a CAD tool which employs the synthesis strategy of Stepwise Refinement consisting of a global optimization to choose the appropriate building block structure and a local optimization to exploit the special cells of a given ASIC library. Besides, depending on the required system clock pipeline registers can be placed automatically into these building blocks. All these optimization steps allow the generation of customizable and portable arithmetic building blocks which can be easily integrated into a data path.