Determining essential implicants based on product-term separation

Two-level logic minimization is an important tool in digital integrate circuit design environment, in which the essential prime implicant determining procedure plays an important role. The performance of the procedure produces a great impact on the efficiency of the whole minimization process. For a given cover of a function f, P = {p¹, p², ... p^k}, we investigate the overlapping problems between the products of P and propose a method to solve the overlapping problem. Based on the method, we present a strategy to determine essential primes from the given cover. Compared to the previous results, the new method reduces the computer time that essential determining procedure spent greatly. In order to show the effectiveness of the new method, some experimental results for a set of benchmark examples are provided.