Design and Evaluation of a Specialized Computer Architecture for Manipulating Binary Decision Diagrams

Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) are an extremely important data structure used in many logic design, synthesis and verification applications. Symbolic problem representations make BDDs a feasible data structure for use on many problems that have discrete representations. Efficient implementations of BOD algorithms on general purpose computers has made manipulating large binary decision diagrams possible. Much research has gone into making BOD algorithms more efficient on general purpose computers. Despite amazing increases in performance and capacity of such computers over the last decade, they may not be the best way to solve large, specialized problems. A computer architecture designed specifically to execute algorithms on binary decision diagrams has been created here to evaluate the possible performance improvements in BOD manipulation. This specialized computer will be described and its implementation discussed with respect to the important aspects of efficient BDD manipulations. This thesis will demonstrate that significant performance increases are possible using a specialized computer architecture for manipulating binary decision diagrams