Weighted and Ordered Direct Cover Algorithms for Minimization of MVL Functions

In this paper, weighted and ordered direct cover algorithms (abbreviated as WDC and ODC, respectively) for synthesis of multiple-valued logic (MVL) functions are proposed. The algorithms are tested using 50000 randomly generated 2-variable 4-valued and 2-variable 5-valued functions. The results obtained are compared to those obtained using existing direct cover techniques. We show that the proposed approaches outperform other existing direct cover based techniques in terms of the average number of product terms required to realize a given MVL function.