Automatically connecting hardware blocks via light-weight matching techniques

Abstract

In modern chip design, many different blocks are assembled in a single chip. Normally, these blocks have been written by different developers or even licensed from other companies. Correctly connecting all blocks is a tedious task. State of the art tools for automatically generating the connections either require identical port-names or additional user input describing the intended connections. In this paper we present an automatic approach for connecting different blocks. In contrast to previous approaches, we neither need exact name matching of the port-names nor additional user input. An evaluation showed the advantages of our approach. For seven of eight designs our approach generated better connections than a previous approach, including a design which has been optimized for being used with the previous approach. A second goal of this paper is to understand the limitations of the presented light-weight matching techniques.