Fast node merging with don't cares using logic implications

Abstract

Node merging is a popular and effective logic restructuring technique that has recently been applied to minimize logic circuits. However, in the previous satisfiability (SAT)-based methods, the search for node mergers required trial-and-error validity checking of a potentially large set of candidate mergers. Here, we propose a new method, which directly identifies node mergers using logic implications without any SAT solving calls. Although the efficiency benefits of the method come at the expense of quality, we further engage the redundancy removal and the wire replacement techniques to enhance its quality. The experimental results show that the proposed optimization method achieves approximately 46 times the speedup while possessing a competitive capability of circuit minimization compared to the state-of-the-art method. © 2006 IEEE.