Using reconfigurable computing techniques to accelerate problems in the CAD domain: A case study with Boolean satisfiability

The Boolean satisfiability problem lies at the core of several CAD applications, including automatic test pattern generation and logic synthesis. This paper describes and evaluates an approach for accelerating Boolean satisfiability using configurable hardware. Our approach harnesses the increasing speed and capacity of field-programmable gate arrays by tailoring the SAT-solver circuit to the particular formula being solved. This input-specific technique gets high performance due both to (i) a direct mapping of Boolean operations to logic gates, and (ii) large amounts of fine grain parallelism in the implication processing. Overall, these strategies yields impressive speedups (>200× in many cases) compared to current software approaches, and they require only modest amounts of hardware. In a broader sense, this paper alerts the hardware design community to the increasing importance of input-specific designs, and documents their promise via a quantitative study of input-specific SAT solving.