A data parallel approach to Boolean function manipulation using BDDs

The paper describes an Electronic CAD package exploiting the CM-200 architecture to manipulate boolean functions. The package exploits Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) to symbolically operate with boolean functions. The data parallel approach is based on distributing BDD nodes do the available Processing Elements and traversing BDDs in a breadth-first manner. The behaviour of the algorithm is studied and the results which have been obtained obtained for an application developed with the package are reported. They show that the approach exploits well the parallel hardware and is highly scalable; if implemented on state-of-the-art and fully configured systems, it could solve problems which can not be faced with conventional architectures