The Whole program path paper describes a very useful mechanism
to
describe program behaviour. This mechanism can be applied to a wide
variety of other areas also such as timing/ delay analysis of circuits
where
the circuit is represented by means of a graph. The multiplexers in
the
ciruit can be thought of as the branching points. For a reasonable
set of
test vectors, the whole program paths algorithm can be used to find
out
the mostly executed paths and their delays in the circuit and then
pass on
the information to an optimizer which can try to reduce the delays.
The
key point is that a critical path may not be executed most of the time
and may not require much optimization. The product of the frequency
of
execution of a path and the delay in that path is a more accurate
measurement. Identification of hot sub-paths can be translated to
identifying slow sub-circuits. Thus we can build a good automated circuit
delay optimizer based on the WPP mechanism.
Subramanian Rajagopalan