Perturb and simplify: multilevel boolean network optimizer

Abstract

In this paper, we present logic optimization techniques for multilevel combinational networks. Our techniques apply a sequence of perturbations which result in simplification of the circuit. The perturbation and simplification is achieved through wires/gates addition and removal which are guided by the Automatic Test Pattern Generation (ATPG) based reasoning. The main operations of our approaches are incremental transformations of the circuit (such as adding wires/gates and changing gate's functionality) to remove some particular wire. At each iteration, a summary information of such wires/gates addition and removal is precomputed first. Then, a transformation is chosen to remove several wires at once. We have performed experiments on MCNC benchmarks and compared the results to those of misll and RAMBO. Experimental results are very encouraging. © 1996 IEEE.