ORDERED BINARY DECISION DIAGRAMS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE IN COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN OF VLSI CIRCUITS

Many problems in computer-aided design of highly integrated circuits (CAD for VLSI) can be transformed to the task of manipulating objects over finite domains. The efficiency of these operations depends substantially on the chosen data structures. In the last years, ordered binary decision diagrams (OBDDs) have proven to be a very efficient data structure in this context. Here, we give a survey on these developments and stress the deep interactions between basic research and practically relevant applied research with its immediate impact on the performance improvement of modern CAD design and verification tools.