Partitioning of circuit netlists is important in many phases of VLSI design, ranging from layout to testing and hardware simulation. The ratio cut objective function [29] has received much attention since it naturally captures both mincut and equipartition, the two traditional goals of partitioning. In this paper, we show that the second smallest eigenvalue of a matrix derived from the netlist ...

We present a new efficient heuristic that finds good ratio-cut bipartitions of hypergraphs that model large VLSI netlists. Ratio cut measure is given by the ratio of the number of nets cut between two blocks and the product of the cardinality (size) of each block. Hypergraphs model VLSI netlists in a more natural fashion than do graphs. Our new heuristic may be considered a hybrid between the a...

We consider speeding up general-purpose applications with hardware accelerators. Traditionally hardware accelerators are tediously hand-crafted to achieve top performance. ASC (A Stream Compiler) simplifies exploration of hardware accelerators by transforming the hardware design task into a software design process using only ’gcc’ and ’make’ to obtain a hardware netlist. ASC enables programmers...

With the globalization of semiconductor industry, hardware Trojans (HTs) are an emergent security threat in modern integrated circuit (IC) production. Research is now being conducted into designing more accurate and efficient methods to detect HTs. Recently, a number machine learning (ML)-based HT detection approaches have been proposed; however, most them still use knowledge-driven design feat...