AT2 bounds for a class of VLSI problems and string matching

• Authors: Micah Adler;John Byers
• Venue: SPAA '94 Proceedings of the sixth annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures
• Year: 1994

We present a class of boolean functions which have regional mappings, a generalization of the transitivity property defined in [12]. We prove that all transitive problems have regional mappings, as do a variety of interesting computational problems such as merging two sorted lists of arbitrary length, generalized integer multiplication and matrix-vector products. We present a general area-time lower bound for VLSI implementations of problems with regional mappings and confirm that the lower bound matches the previously known bound for transitive problems. For generalized integer multiplication, we present a custom VLSI implementation which provides a matching upper bound. The results improve AT2 bounds on a number of open problems.In related work, we consider the problem of finding occurrences of a P-bit pattern in an N-bit text string. We show that every chip capable of solving this string matching problem requires AT2 = &OHgr;(PN). A custom VLSI design, using an idea similar to that used for generalized integer multiplication, provides a matching upper bound when N is polynomial in P.