Fast Heuristic Minimization of Exclusive-Sums-of-Products
Alan Mishchenko, Marek A. Perkowski · PDXScholar (Portland State University) · 2001
Exclusive Sums-Of-Products (ESOPs) play an important role in logic synthesis and design-for-test. This paper presents an improved version of the heuristic ESOP minimization procedure proposed in [1,2]. The improvements concern three aspects of the procedure: (1) computation of the starting ESOP cover; (2) increase of the search space for solutions by applying a larger set of cube transformations; (3) development of specialized data-structures for robust manipulation of ESOP covers. Comparison of the new heuristic ESOP minimizer EXORCISM-4 with other minimizers (EXMIN2 [3], MINT[4], EXORCISM-2[1] and EXORCISM–3[2]) show that, in most cases, EXORCISM-4 produces results of comparable or better quality on average ten times faster.