Wave Steered FSMs

In this paper we address the problem of designing very high throughput finite state machines (FSMs). The presence of loops in sequential circuits prevents a straightforward and generalized application of pipelining techniques, which work so well for combinational circuits, to increase FSM performance. We observe that appropriate extensions of the “wave steering” technique [17,18] are possible to partially overcome the problem. Additionally we use FSM decomposition theory to decouple state variable dependencies. Application of these two techniques to MCNC benchmarks resulted in a factor of 3 average throughput increase as compared to a standard cell implementation, at the expense of factor 3.7 area and less than factor 2 latency penalties.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Luca Macchiarulo, Shih-Ming Shu, Malgorzata Marek-Sadowska
• Keywords: Average Throughput Increase, DATE 2000, Factor 3.7 Area, FSM Decomposition Theory, Hardware