Petrick’s Method

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In Boolean algebra, Petrick’s method (also known as the branch-and-bound method) is a technique for determining all minimum sum-of-products solutions from a prime implicant chart. Petrick’s method is very tedious for large charts, but it is easy to implement on a computer. 1. Reduce the prime implicant chart by eliminating the essential prime implicant rows and the corresponding columns. 2. Label the rows of the reduced prime implicant chart P1, P2, P3, P4, etc. 3. Form a logical function P which is true when all the columns are covered. P consists of a product of sums where each sum term has the form (Pi0 + Pi1 + cdots + PiN), where each Pij represents a row covering column i. 4. Reduce P to a minimum sum of products by multiplying out and applying X + XY = X. 5. Each term in the result represents a solution, that is, a set of rows which covers all of the minterms in the table.