Optimal integrated circuit generation

Claim 1

In a data processing system having at least one processor and a memory, a method for generating a schematic description of an integrated circuit, said circuit including both pass and restoring logic networks, comprising the processor performing the steps of: a) accepting inputs and corresponding outputs for a function to be performed by the integrated circuit; b) generating, and storing in memory, data structures comprised of multidimensional spaces for representing the inputs and the outputs and storing a representation of the inputs and the outputs in the data structures, said data structures including data structures that view the inputs as pass values and a data structure that views the inputs as only control variables; c) finding prime implicants of the representation held in data structures and using prime implicants of the representations held in the data structures that view the inputs as pass variables to represent pass logic networks, and using prime implicants from the data structures that view the inputs only as control variables to represent restoring logic networks; d) selecting certain of the pass and restoring logic prime implicants using an optimization procedure to generate a cover of the function; and e) producing the schematic description of the integrated circuit by generating pass and restoring logic networks for the selected prime implicants.