The University of British Columbia

FPGA architects are always searching for more benchmark circuits to stress CAD tools and device architectures. In this paper we present a new method to generate benchmark circuits by removing part of a real circuit and replacing it with a synthetic clone. This replacement or stitching process can easily introduce combinational loops if the synthetic circuit contains an input-to-output dependence that was not in the original subcircuit it is replacing. We show that this can be expressed as the graph monomorphism problem, and that a solution to that problem gives a precise stitching assignment that is cycle-free. This technique can be used to create new benchmark circuits that are identical to the original circuit except for small, local changes. The resulting semi-synthetic benchmarks are ideal for testing incremental place and route tools.