Two-rail cellular cascades

Abstract

The increasing importance of integrated circuit technologies has motivated research into the development of systematic and efficient procedures for the design of cellular arrays---that is, arrays of logical assemblies, or cells, that are interconnected in a regular fashion. A useful and analytically attractive approach to the design of two-dimensional, edgefed cellular arrays for the realization of arbitrary switching functions is based upon the decomposition of the arbitrary function into a set of subfunctions, each of which is independently produced by one of the columns of the array. In this approach, each column of the array might realize, for example, an individual member of a minimum covering set of prime implicants; these subfunctions are then composed by "collecting" the column outputs in a special row of the array whose final output is a realization of the desired function, or alternatively by using edge jumpers in the same array to accomplish the collecting function.