Numerical computation of characteristic polynomials of Boolean functions and its applications

We study the problem of evaluation of characteristic polynomials of Boolean functions with applications to combinational circuit verification. Two Boolean functions are equivalent if and only if their corresponding characteristic polynomials are identical. However, to verify the equivalence of two Boolean functions it is often impractical to construct the corresponding characteristic polynomials due to a possible exponential blow-up of the terms of the polynomials. Instead, we compare their values at a sample point without explicitly constructing the characteristic polynomials. Specifically, we sample uniformly at random in a unit cube and determine whether two characteristic polynomials are identical by their evaluations at the sample point; the error probability is zero when there are no round-off errors. In the presence of round-off errors, we sample on regular grids and analyze the error probability. We discuss in detail the Shannon expansion for characteristic polynomial evaluation. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.