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Nonstandard Combinational Synthesis

It is commonly believed that symmetric operations like NAND and NOR are better for combinational logic synthesis. However, recent research cited in reference [1] suggests that asymmetrical operators like < and => may have better expressiveness based on two metrics. The first metric shows that < and => require fewer total gates than NAND/NOR to express all 16 Boolean operations on two variables, but it is unclear if this generalization holds for more variables. The second metric evaluates the number of functions that can be expressed using a given number of gates, and libraries with mixed symmetric and asymmetric operations seem to perform better in practice. However, implementing < and => may require more transistors than NAND and NOR. More testing is needed to determine if

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6 views

Nonstandard Combinational Synthesis

It is commonly believed that symmetric operations like NAND and NOR are better for combinational logic synthesis. However, recent research cited in reference [1] suggests that asymmetrical operators like < and => may have better expressiveness based on two metrics. The first metric shows that < and => require fewer total gates than NAND/NOR to express all 16 Boolean operations on two variables, but it is unclear if this generalization holds for more variables. The second metric evaluates the number of functions that can be expressed using a given number of gates, and libraries with mixed symmetric and asymmetric operations seem to perform better in practice. However, implementing < and => may require more transistors than NAND and NOR. More testing is needed to determine if

Uploaded by

ksp_eda
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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It is a common belief that symmetric operations are better for combinational logic synthesis.

Recent research [1] based on experimental results suggests that asymmetrical operators {<, =>} have better expressiveness. Two metrics of expressiveness are described in the literature [1]. The first one uses the total gates required to express all 16 Boolean operations on two variables, where the set {<, =>} outperforms traditional favorites NAND/NOR. It is however, not clear if this metric can be generalized for the case of n variables, and whether asymmetrical operators continue to be better when the number of variables increases. The second metric takes a given number of gates and measures the number of functions expressible by them. Libraries with a mixture of symmetric and asymmetric operations like {<, =} and {=>, ^} seem to do better in practice. NAND and NOR seem to be better for implementation, as reducing the transistor counts for {<, =>} requires pass transistor logic. More extensive validation of the models is required to determine if asymmetrical operators will become viable.

References: [1] Exact Combinational Logic Synthesis and Non-Standard Circuit Design by Paul Tarau and Brenda Luderman.

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