Efficient digital-to-analog encoding

Abstract

An important issue in analog circuit design is the problem of digital-to-analog conversion, i.e., the encoding of Boolean variables into a single analog value which contains enough information to reconstruct the values of the Boolean variables. A natural question is: what is the complexity of implementing the digital-to-analog encoding function? That question was answered by Wegener (see Inform. Processing Lett., vol.60, no.1, p.49-52, 1995), who proved matching lower and upper bounds on the size of the circuit for the encoding function. In particular, it was proven that [(3n-1)/2] 2-input arithmetic gates are necessary and sufficient for implementing the encoding function of n Boolean variables. However, the proof of the upper bound is not constructive. In this paper, we present an explicit construction of a digital-to-analog encoder that is optimal in the number of 2-input arithmetic gates. In addition, we present an efficient analog-to-digital decoding algorithm. Namely, given the encoded analog value, our decoding algorithm reconstructs the original Boolean values. Our construction is suboptimal in that it uses constants of maximum size n log n bits; the nonconstructive proof uses constants of maximum size 2n+[log n] bits.