Don't-care term

In digital logic, a don't-care term (abbreviated DC, historically also known as redundancies, irrelevancies, optional entries, invalid combinations, vacuous combinations, forbidden combinations, unused states or logical remainders) for a function is an input-sequence (a series of bits) for which the function output does not matter. An input that is known to never occur is a can't-happen term. Both these types of conditions are treated the same way in logic design and may be referred to collectively as don't-care conditions for brevity. The designer of a logic circuit to implement the function need not care about such inputs, but can choose the circuit's output arbitrarily, usually such that the simplest circuit results (minimization). Don't-care terms are important to consider in minimizing logic circuit design, including graphical methods like Karnaugh–Veitch maps and algebraic methods such as the Quine–McCluskey algorithm. In 1958, Seymour Ginsburg proved that minimization of states of a finite-state machine with don't-care conditions does not necessarily yield a minimization of logic elements. Direct minimization of logic elements in such circuits was computationally impractical (for large systems) with the computing power available to Ginsburg in 1958. Examples of don't-care terms are the binary values 1010 through 1111 (10 through 15 in decimal) for a function that takes a binary-coded decimal (BCD) value, because a BCD value never takes on such values (so called pseudo-tetrades); in the pictures, the circuit computing the lower left bar of a 7-segment display can be minimized to b + by an appropriate choice of circuit outputs for dcba = 1010...1111. Write-only registers, as frequently found in older hardware, are often a consequence of don't-care optimizations in the trade-off between functionality and the number of necessary logic gates. Don't-care states can also occur in encoding schemes and communication protocols. "Don't care" may also refer to an unknown value in a multi-valued logic system, in which case it may also be called an X value or don't know.