AllSAT for Combinational Circuits

Motivated by the need to improve the scalability of Intel's in-house Static Timing Analysis (STA) tool, we consider the problem of enumerating all the solutions of a single-output combinational Boolean circuit, called AllSAT-CT. While AllSAT-CT is immediately reducible to enumerating the solutions of a Boolean formula in Conjunctive Normal Form (AllSAT-CNF), our experiments had shown that such a reduction, followed by applying state-of-The-Art AllSAT-CNF tools, does not scale well on neither our industrial AllSAT-CT instances nor generic circuits, both when the user requires the solutions to be disjoint or when they can be non-disjoint. We focused on understanding the reasons for this phenomenon for the well-known iterative blocking family of AllSAT-CNF algorithms. We realized that existing blocking AllSAT-CNF algorithms fail to generalize efficiently for AllSAT-CT, since they are restricted to Boolean logic. Consequently, we introduce three dedicated AllSAT-CT algorithms that are ternary-logic-Aware: A ternary simulation-based algorithm TALE, a dual-rail&MaxSAT-based algorithm MARS, and their combination. Specifically, we introduce in MARS two novel blocking clause generation approaches for the disjoint and non-disjoint cases. We implemented our algorithms in our new tool HALL. We show that HALL scales substantially better than any reduction to existing AllSAT-CNF tools on our industrial STA instances as well as on publicly available families of combinational circuits for both the disjoint and the non-disjoint cases.