Description:
Incorporating functional partitioning into a synthesis methodology leads to several important advantages. In functional partitioning, we first partition a functional specification into smaller subspecifications and then synthesize structure for each, in contrast to the current approach of first synthesizing structure for the entire specification and then partitioning that structure. One advantage is the improvement in I/O performance and package count, when partitioning among hardware blocks with size and I/O constraints, such as FPGAs or blocks within an ASIC. A second advantage is reduction in synthesis runtimes. We describe these important advantages, concluding that further research on functional partitioning can lead to inproved results from synthesis environments.