Many practical applications of satisfiability solving employ multiple steps to encode an original problem formulation into conjunctive normal form. Often circuits are used as intermediate representation before encoding those circuits into clausal form. These circuits however might contain redundant isomorphic sub-circuits. If blindly translated into clausal form, this redundancy is retained and increases solving time unless specific preprocessing algorithms are used. Furthermore, such redundant sub-formula structure might only emerge during solving and needs to be addressed by inprocessing. This paper presents a new approach which extracts gate information from the formula and applies congruence closure to match and eliminate redundant gates. Besides new algorithms for gate extraction, we also describe previous unpublished attempts to tackle this problem. Experiments focus on the important problem of combinational equivalence checking for hardware designs and show that our new approach yields a substantial gain in CNF solver performance.
@InProceedings{biere_et_al:LIPIcs.SAT.2024.6, author = {Biere, Armin and Fazekas, Katalin and Fleury, Mathias and Froleyks, Nils}, title = {{Clausal Congruence Closure}}, booktitle = {27th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2024)}, pages = {6:1--6:25}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-334-8}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2024}, volume = {305}, editor = {Chakraborty, Supratik and Jiang, Jie-Hong Roland}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SAT.2024.6}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-205287}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SAT.2024.6}, annote = {Keywords: Satisfiability Solving, Congruence Closure, Structural Hashing, SAT Sweeping, Conjunctive Normal Form, Combinational Equivalence Checking, Hardware Equivalence Checking} }
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