Date: Monday, December 7, 2015
Time: 01:30 PM – 02:30 PM 
Location: Building 24, Room120

Abstract:

State assignment (SA) for Finite State Machines (FSMs) has a significant impact on the area and power of synthesized sequential circuits. Due to the complexity of the state assignment problem and the limitations of existing deterministic solutions, evolutionary algorithms are employed for solving the state assignment problem.

In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic pairwise swap search (PPSS) state assignment algorithm. The algorithm is based on assigning probabilities for each pair of code swaps and intelligently updating these probabilities such that potentially useful code swaps will get high code swap probabilities, which will increase their chance of being explored. Due to the fixed number of code swaps to be explored in each iteration, the algorithm explores code swaps in a gradual manner such that code swaps with high probability are explored before those with lower probability.

The algorithm employs the use of Tabu lists to diversify search exploration and performs hill climbing when the solution does not improve by accepting the code swap that results in the next best solution from the current solution. The proposed algorithm is employed for FSM state encoding targeting the optimization of both area and power. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PPSS state assignment algorithm in comparison to other evolutionary state assignment algorithms. Significantly better area and power results are achieved in comparison to all compared techniques.

Biography:

Dr. Aiman El-Maleh is an Associate Professor in the Computer Engineering Department at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals. He holds a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering, with dean’s honor list, from McGill University, Canada, in 1995. He was a member of scientific staff with Mentor Graphics Corp., a leader in design automation, from 1995-1998. Dr. El-Maleh‘s research interests are in the areas of synthesis, testing, and verification of digital systems. In addition, he has research interests in defect and soft error-tolerant design, VLSI design, design automation, and error correcting codes. He has published over seventy papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings and holds three US patents. Dr. El-Maleh is the winner of the best paper award for the most outstanding contribution in the field of test for 1995 at the European Design & Test Conference.

All faculty, researchers and graduate students are invited to attend.