Finding regularity: Describing and analysing circuits that are not quite regular

Abstract

We demonstrate some simple but powerful methods that ease the problem of describing and generating circuits that exhibit a degree of regularity, but are not as beautifully regular as the text-book examples. Our motivating example is not a circuit, but a piece of C code that is widely used in graphics applications. It is a sequence of compare-and-swap operations that computes the median of 25 inputs. We use the example to illustrate a set of circuit design methods that aid in the writing of sophisticated circuit generators. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.