Sequential Circuits from Regular Expressions Revisited

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new trigger-set algorithm for constructing sequential circuits from regular expressions, providing an alternative to traditional methods and demonstrating its effectiveness through a regex matcher with performance comparisons.

Contribution

It presents the trigger-set approach for sequential circuit construction from regular expressions, offering a novel alternative to existing methods.

Findings

The trigger-set algorithm successfully constructs sequential circuits from regular expressions.

The regex matcher based on the new approach shows competitive performance.

The method provides an efficient way to implement regex matching with sequential circuits.

Abstract

We revisit the long-neglected problem of sequential circuit constructions from regular expressions. The class of languages that are recognized by sequential circuits is equivalent to the class of regular languages. This fact is shown in [5] together with an inductive construction technique from regular expressions. In this note, we present an alternative algorithm, called the trigger-set approach, obtained by reversing well-known the follow-set approach to construct automata. We use our algorithm to obtain a regular expression matcher based on sequential circuits. Finally, we report our performance results in comparison with existing automata-based matchers.