ELEC1710 – Week 3 Lecture 1 – Simplifying Logic Expressions

Standard Forms –

 All Boolean expressions can ve converted into either of 2 standard forms

o Sum of Products
o Product of Sums
 Makes the following much easier and systematic
 Sum of Products
o Expressions are product terms summed by Boolean addition
o Examples
 AB + ABC
 ABC + CDE + notBCnotD
o Requires things to be a stand alone product
o These are not in SOP
 AB + notAnotBnotC
o SOP expressions simply require ORing outputs of and gates
o Conversion to SOP form


 Standard SOP form
o All variable in the domain appear in each product term in the expression
o Ex. Missing one of the terms from each chunk of letters
o It would still be in SOP form but not Standard SOP form

o
 Product of Sums
o Expressions are sum terms “multiplied” together
o Ex

o
 Standard POS form
 o All variables in the domain appear in each sum term in the expression
o A Max term is a sum term involving all variables in the domain
 Standard POS expressions can be call max terms
o With POS form make x = 0, remember they act like and gates NOT OR gates
 Karnaugh maps
o Great for expressions involving 2, 3 or 4 variables, but gets difficult after that
o A Karnaugh map is a truth table, re arranged in a special way:
 With rows and columns labelled by inputs A B and C, adjacent cells are
labelled by minterms which differ in only one literal

o
o Four Variable Karnaugh Map

o
o Make sure you only label Karnaugh Maps using GRAY CODE
o After Karnaugh map has been filled in for a given expression, simplification is a 2
step process
 Group the 1’s
 Groups to enclose adjacent cells
 Groups must be square or rectangular and contain 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16
cells
 Goal is to:
o Cover all 1’s at least once
o Maximise size of groups
o Minimise number of groups
 Determine simplified SOP expression
 Adjacencies “wrap around”