Product Transformation and Heuristic EXOR-AND-OR Logic Synthesis of Incompletely Specified Functions

Previously, the synthesis of reversible and quantum permutative circuits based on products of Exclusive-OR (EXOR) sums of inputs (POE) was explored as an approach to reduce quantum cost. Herein, the mathematical representation used in POE expressions is formally detailed and contrasted with the pseudoproduct-based theory of Luccio and Pagli. The theory and practice of product transformation, or computation of equivalent POE expressions, is presented. To demonstrate the generality of the mathematical representations outside of the reversible domain, a new method to synthesize incompletely specified functions as EXOR-AND-OR circuits is introduced. The method is heuristic. It first uses spectral information from the Walsh-Hadamard transform to compute a set of POE implicants for a function, and then uses product transformation to minimize both the total number of literals and unique EXOR sums (ignoring polarity) used in the POE implicants. The product transformation minimization extends to multioutput functions. The new method has no performance guarantees, i.e., it does not have a fallback mode of minimum or near-minimum sum of products; therefore, it is suited to a tournament synthesis approach. When synthesizing benchmark functions of up to 26 inputs, the new method is shown to typically produce lower cost circuits than heuristic pseudoproduct-based methods.