Abstract
Logic replication is known to be an effective technique to reduce the number of cut nets in partitioned circuits. A new replication model called functional replication is particularly useful for partitioning technology-mapped circuits. 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 min-cut bipartition of a technology-mapped circuit with functional replication using a minimum amount of area overhead. Additionally, we show that our algorithm can be applied to improve the solution produced by any area-constrained functional replication partitioning heuristic.