ICCAD-2013 CAD contest in technology mapping for macro blocks and benchmark suite

Abstract

As technology advances, there is an increasing need in the industrial domain for an algorithm that can map macro blocks. This type of algorithm would solve several front-end problems. For example, existing structural or functional algorithms cannot solve the challenge of mapping large-scale functions without boundary information. Fortunately, in practical problems, we only consider the target mapping functions that are the constructs of the datapath, and these macro blocks are easily recognized through their special arithmetic signatures. In this problem, the contestants need to design a mapping algorithm that recognizes macro blocks and replaces the mapped region with the macro blocks. Therefore, we can fairly evaluate the quality of the mapping algorithm as the size reduction of the revised netlist. Under our well-designed benchmarks, we will clearly differentiate the capability of proposed algorithms with several indexes. We look forward to triggering the academic area to investigate on this problem.