A note on upper bounds on the cp-rank

Hanna and Laffey gave an upper bound on the cp-rank of a completely positive matrix, in terms of its rank and the number of zeros in a full rank principal submatrix. This bound, for the case that the matrix is positive, was improved by Barioli and Berman. In this paper a new straightforward proof of both results is given, and the same approach is used to improve Hanna and Laffey’s bound in the case that the matrix has a zero entry.