In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to the alternative wiring problem by analyzing the implication relationship between nodes of alternative wires. Alternative wiring, or rewiring, refers to the process of adding a redundant connection to a circuit so as to make a target connection redundant and removable from the circuit without altering the functionality of the circuit. The well-known ATPG-based alternative wiring scheme, Redundancy Addition and Removal for Multi-level Boolean Optimization (RAMBO), has shown its effectiveness in solving the problem in the last decade. But, the deficiency of RAMBO lies in its long execution time for redundancy identification among a large set of candidate alternative wires. Our approaches of redundancy identification by source node and destination node implication relationship indicate that a large subset of unnecessary redundancy check processes can be further avoided to improve the efficiency significantly. We propose an algorithm, the Implication Based Alternative Wiring Logic Transformation (IBAW), to integrate the two adroit techniques. IBAW provides a competent solution to the alternative wiring problem and shows an outstanding efficiency in our experiments. Experiments were performed on MCNC benchmark circuits. Results show that IBAW runs 6.8 times faster than the original RAMBO in locating alternative wires and solution quality is maintained.

The single wire replacement attempts to replace a target wire by another wire without changing the circuit functionality. Due to the large searching space required, there is very little success in directly extending the single wire replacement technique to replace multiple wires at the same time. The objective in this paper is to propose a new logic transformation, called the alternative node (Alnode) technique, which attempts to replace multiple wires at a time. Basically, the transformation simultaneously replaces multiple input wires of a gate by a new set of input wires. To accomplish the transformation, we propose several speedup theorems for replacing multiple wires. In this paper, we also demonstrate that the Alnode technique can be applied to achieve power reduction for domino logic and wire length minimization in layouts. The experimental results are encouraging.