Abstract
Logic replication is known to be an effective technique to re- duce the number of cut nets in partitioned circuits. A new replication model called functional replication is particularly useful for partitioning technology mapped circuits [7]. Functional replication differs from traditional replication because it considers the functional dependency of the different output signals of a logic cell on its input signals. Functional replication can lead to a higher reduction in the number of cut nets than traditional replication. In this paper, we give the first theoretical treatment of the min-cut partitioning problem with functional replication. We present a novel two-phase algorithm to compute a rain-cut bipartition of a technology mapped circuit with functional replication using minimum amount of area overhead. And we show that our algorithm can be applied to improve the solution produced by any area-constrained functional replication partitioning heuristic.