In my book about circuit design (Fundamentals of Digital Logic with VHDL from Stephen Brown and Zvonko Vranesic), the writers always prefer a sum-of-product for representing and implementing simple circuits.
In Boolean Algebra, this preference is used as well, but I think mostly because writing sum-of-products is just easier and shorter. And maybe easier to understand for readers.
But when implementing using logic gates I would suppose other considerations than these are made as well. Like costs and delays of the gates.
So, is there a specific reason why preferably sum-of-products implementations are made? F.e. are AND-gates cheaper than OR-gates? I read about the transistor realisation of these gates, but I can't recall such a statement.
Best Answer
From what I learned in my digital logic courses, everything tends to be made with NAND, since they are cheaper and any Boolean function can be realized with NAND (or NOR, for that matter). I'd imagine that sum-of-products implementations (AND and OR gates) aren't particularly ubiquitous due to this.