ABSOLUTE MINIMIZATION OF COMPLETELY SPECIFIED SWITCHING-FUNCTIONS

Abstract

For the automated design of PLA's with a minimum size, we need computationally efficient procedures that can minimize functions of a large number of variables. For such minimization procedures, excessively long processing time and excessively large memory requirement are major problems to overcome. This paper presents a new absolute minimization procedure for standard PLA's with reduced computation time and memory space. The improvement of the procedure, which is based on the decomposition of ratio sets, is mainly due to the detection of all essential prime implicants during the derivation of inclusion functions and also the merger of two separate procedures previously published by Cutler and Muroga [7] into one efficient procedure.