Spectral Techniques in VLSI CAD

Spectral Techniques in VLSI CAD have become a subject of renewed interest in the design automation community due to the emergence of new and efficient methods for the computation of discrete function spectra. In the past, spectral computations for digital logic were too complex for practical implementation. The use of decision diagrams for spectral computations has greatly reduced this obstacle allowing for the development of new and useful spectral techniques for VLSI synthesis and verification. Several new algorithms for the computation of the Walsh, Reed-Muller, arithmetic and Haar spectra are described. The relation of these computational methods to traditional ones is also provided. Spectral Techniques in VLSI CAD provides a unified formalism of the representation of bit-level and word-level discrete functions in the spectral domain and as decision diagrams. An alternative and unifying interpretation of decision diagram representations is presented since it is shown that many of the different commonly used varieties of decision diagrams are merely graphical representations of various discrete function spectra. Viewing various decision diagrams as being described by specific se