Highly-cited ideas in system codesign and synthesis

We conducted a study of citations of papers published between 1996 and 2006 in the CODES and ISSS conferences, representing the hardware/software codesign and system synthesis community. Citations, meaning non-self-citations only, were considered from all papers known to Google Scholar, as well as only from subsequent CODES/ISSS papers. We list the most-cited CODES/ISSS papers of each year, summarizing their topics, and discussing common features of those papers. For comparison purposes, we also measured citations for the computer architecture community's ISCA and MICRO conferences, and for the field-programmable gate array community's FPGA and FCCM conferences. We point out several interesting differences among the citation patterns of the three communities.