Algorithms and Data Structures in VLSI Design: OBDD - Foundations and Applications

Searching through the items I have purchased here at Amazon in the past I came upon a disturbing site: Someone had rated this book with 2 stars and claimed to be "interested in all aspects of algorithms and methods VLSI design automation". As you may see from below 13 out of 13 costumers ( I will be the 14th) seem to disagree or not find his comments all to helpful. I have rated this book with 5 starts in part to counteract this guy's horrible judgment and in part to make justice to a very well written book. At least that's what I thought after I first read it (during my sophomore year of college) after having finished an introduction course in Digital Design. What was nice about this book at the time was that it reinforced the basic concepts that my introductory course had left kind of hanging. This book is for the more mathematically inclined Computer Science or Electrical and Computer Engineering majors who want a more profound insight to digital design from small to large to very large integration. If you thought that just because it's a more theoretically oriented book it doesn't also provide good example you were of course wrong. There is a sizeable number of examples and best of all pseudo code of the algorithms which are explained here.I hope this ACTUALLY helps

Imagine that you have a many million transistor chip. No, imagine that you have a many billion transistor chip! And you want to prove that this chip does what it suppose to do. You cannot enumerate all the states of your chip and check that all is well, two to the power "a billion" is a pretty big number. The trick is then to iterate through the "higher levels" of a "compressed" form of the system to be validated, while being careful to keep the respresentation of the system compact. That is what ordered binary decision diagrams (OBDD) is all about and this book is a very good introduction to the subject.