Using Bool -- finding a minimized SOP expression

The "bool" program is available in ~ee120/bin. If you have put this in your path, you should be able to exe- cute this program by simply typing "bool". With no argu- ments, you will get the output:

Usage: bool inputfile [variable_string]

telling you how to use the program. The "inputfile" is a filename containing the function to be minimized. It may be a function with up to about 50 variables. The "[variable_string]" is an optional string of variable names you may want to use, one character per variable. The default is to use the letters of the alphabet as variable names.

Instead of giving a strict "how-to-use", here is an example input file which shows what the input can look like:

0000xxxxx 0
00010xxxx 1
00011xxxx 0
001xxxxxx 1
011xx0xxx 1
011xx1xxx 0
100xxxx1x x
100xx0x0x x
100xx1x0x x
101xxxxx0 x
101xxxxx1 x
110xxx0xx x
110xxx1xx x
111xxxxxx x

where the first column is the inputs and the second is the output.

The output produced from the above is:

       After selection of prime-implicants:
                b'de' + b'c + cf'

Note: the input and output values may be 0, 1, or x. Any unspecified line of the truth table is taken to have a 0 output. The input variables in this case are labeled as a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i. You can run the above example for yourself by running: bool example The code for this program can be found in the directory ~ee120tep/Bool, for those interested.