Extended BDD's: trading off canonicity for structure in verification algorithms

The authors present an extension to binary decision diagrams (BDDs) that exploits the information contained in the structure of the circuit to produce a compact, semicanonical representation. The extended BDDs (XBDDs) retain many of the advantages of BDDs while at the same time allowing one to deal with larger circuits. Using XBDDs, it is possible to verify circuits for which the BDDs could not be built in the same amount of space. Results of the application of XBDDs to combinational multipliers are presented.<<ETX>>