Prime Implicant Computation Based on Adjacent Minterm Operations

A new method for generating prime implicants is presented in the paper. A minimization algorithm for incompletely specified functions based on the method is also given. The procedure starts from a minterm, base minterm. By searching for its adjacent minterms from lower order to higher order, a prime implicant is generated. Because adjacent minterm operations are simple for computers to process, the method is time saving. We have compared the proposed method to the previous works over a set of randomly produced inputs. The experiments show that the proposed method is efficient for small size questions.