3. Practice

The very first circuits were designed and optimized by hand: each gate and each transistor saved represents dollars less in the manufacturing cost of each chip.

It remains true that any gain in circuit area lowers the unit cost of chip manufacture, and this is all the more true the higher the production volume. But, given the size of today's circuits, all these low-level optimization steps are now fully automatic. One of the keys to this process is the automatic manipulation and reduction of Boolean formulas, whose size is necessarily as large as that of the circuits to be produced.

Let's just mention three aspects of this subject:

1. Automatic synthesis of pre-broadcast circuits from their netlist;

2. Automatic synthesis of arithmetic circuits ;

3. BDD normal form...