Are XORs in logic synthesis really necessary?

This paper follows recent research on insufficient synthesis performance for XOR-intensive circuits, and introduces a novel logic representation with a native support of XOR gates, the XOR-AND-Inverter Graphs (XAIGs). A rewriting algorithm over XAIG has been implemented in the logic synthesis and optimization package ABC, as the first step towards a complete synthesis process. The results show that XAIG based rewriting can help to discover XORs and improves the area of a mapped network in some cases.