EDDY: A Multi-Core BDD Package with Dynamic Memory Management and Reduced Fragmentation

In recent years, hardware systems have significantly grown in complexity. Due to the increasing complexity, there is a need to continuously improve the quality of the hardware design process. This leads designers to strive for more efficient data structures and algorithms operating on them to guarantee the correct behavior of such systems through verification techniques like model checking and meet time-to-market constraints. A Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) is a suitable data structure as it provides a canonical compact representation of Boolean functions, given variable ordering, and efficient algorithms for manipulating them. However, reduced ordered BDDs also have challenges: There is a large memory consumption for the BDD construction of some complex practical functions and the use of realizations in the form of BDD packages strongly depends on the application.

To address these issues, this paper presents a novel multi-core package called Engineer Decision Diagrams Yourself (EDDY) with dynamic memory management and reduced fragmentation. Experiments on BDD benchmarks of both combinational circuits and model checking show that using EDDY leads to a significantly performance boost compared to state-of-the-art packages.

Download here