PRONTO: Quick PLA Product Reduction

A PLA is a regular, modular combinational function implementation popular in VLSI design. Among methods which reduce the cost of implementing a given PLA specification, reducing the number of product terms is particularly fruitful. Optimum product term reduction for practical-sized problems is prohibitively complex. Previous suboptimal, heuristic product term reducers have been iterative or indirect. PRONTO is a direct, one-pass method for heuristically reducing the number of product terms required to specify a PLA. Results of using PRONTO on a small set of examples show solutions up to 21% better than previously reported, using a procedure of modest complexity.