[755-1] Tools for logic minimization

[Konstantinos Dovrolis <dovrolis@cs.wisc.edu>]

Folks,

You may come up in your project with large chunks 
of combinational logic, that obviously you would
not like to minimize by hand. The same holds for
the design of state machines for your control
logic.

You can use two simple tools (written at UCB in
the 80s):

espresso: for two-level logic minimization.

meg: for the state-transition and output equations
    of Mealy state machines, given a state
    diagram.

The tools are sufficiently documented in the 
man pages that you can find in:
/p/course/cs755-david/public/html/UCBtools/bin
Examples are also given in these man pages.

You can view the files in the above directory
using nroff (since they are not installed as
man pages). For example:
	nroff -man espresso.1

The executables espresso and meg are in the directory:
/p/course/cs755-david/public/html/UCBtools/bin
that I suggest you add in your PATH.

Note that a two-level logic expression (sum of
products, for example) that espresso produces can 
be readily implemented using just NAND standard 
cells from the scn08hp library, or using the AND-OR 
standard cells.

C.