Recent Progress in the Boolean Domain

Book excerpt: In today’s world, people are using more and more digital systems in daily life. Such systems utilize the elementariness of Boolean values. A Boolean variable can carry only two different Boolean values: FALSE or TRUE (0 or 1), and has the best interference resistance in technical systems. However, a Boolean function exponentially depends on the number of its variables. This exponential complexity is the cause of major problems in the process of design and realization of circuits. According to Moore’s Law, the complexity of digital systems approximately doubles every 18 months. This requires comprehensive knowledge and techniques to solve very complex Boolean problems. This book summarizes the recent progress in the Boolean domain in solving such issues. Part 1 describes the most powerful approaches in solving exceptionally complex Boolean problems. It is shown how an extremely rare solution could be found in a gigantic search space of more than 10^195 (this is a number of 196 decimal digits) different color patterns. Part 2 describes new research into digital circuits that realize Boolean functions. This part contains the chapters “Design” and “Test”, which present solutions to problems of power dissipation, and the testing of digital circuits using a special data structure, as well as further topics. Part 3 contributes to the scientific basis of future circuit technologies, investigating the need for completely new design methods for the atomic level of quantum computers. This section also concerns itself with circuit structures in reversible logic as the basis for quantum logic.