@article{2420,
  abstract     = {{ This paper presents the acceleration of minimum-cost covering problems by instance-specific hardware. First, we formulate the minimum-cost covering problem and discuss a branch \& bound algorithm to solve it. Then we describe instance-specific hardware architectures that implement branch \& bound in 3-valued logic and use reduction techniques similar to those found in software solvers. We further present prototypical accelerator implementations and a corresponding design tool flow. Our experiments reveal significant raw speedups up to five orders of magnitude for a set of smaller unate covering problems. Provided that hardware compilation times can be reduced, we conclude that instance-specific acceleration of hard minimum-cost covering problems will lead to substantial overall speedups. }},
  author       = {{Plessl, Christian and Platzner, Marco}},
  issn         = {{0920-8542}},
  journal      = {{Journal of Supercomputing}},
  keywords     = {{reconfigurable computing, instance-specific acceleration, minimum covering}},
  number       = {{2}},
  pages        = {{109--129}},
  publisher    = {{Kluwer Academic Publishers}},
  title        = {{{Instance-Specific Accelerators for Minimum Covering}}},
  doi          = {{10.1023/a:1024443416592}},
  volume       = {{26}},
  year         = {{2003}},
}