Binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) based state assignment for area minimization of sequential circuits

State assignment (SA) for finite state machines (FSMs) is one of the main optimization problems in the synthesis of sequential circuits. It determines the complexity of its combinational circuit and thus area, delay, testability and power dissipation of its implementation. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a nondeterministic heuristic that optimizes a problem by iteratively trying to improve a candidate solution with regard to a given measure of quality. PSO optimizes a problem by having a population of candidate solutions called particles, and moving them around in the search-space according to a simple mathematical formulae. In this paper, we propose an improved binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO)