A New Viewpoint on Two-Level Logic Minimization

This paper presents a new 2-level logic minimization procedure. It consists of computing in an implicit way the cyclic core of the Boolean function f to be minimized. This computation is done through original transformations of sets covering problems that take full advantage of the metaproduct based implicit set of products manipulations. The computational cost of this new procedure is independent of the number of minterms of the function f and of its number of prime implicants, which allows us to treat functions for which these numbers are so large that it has never been possible to perform a 2-level minimization. This method is, as far as we know, the first one that is able to produce the cyclic cores of all the functions of the MCNC benchmark.