An environment for the development of knowledge based expert systems for assistance to VLSI design

A system based on artificial intelligence techniques is presented that is intended to provide an integrated and efficient environment for the development of expert systems oriented toward facilitating VLSI circuit design. The system DEGAS (DEsiGn ASsistant) has its knowledge base structured in terms of rules which use an easily extendable set of primitives to implement the selection of objects and to execute actions upon them. The structural flexibility thus achieved greatly facilitates the task of developing expert systems. After a brief justification of the choice of expert systems in the application context considered, the functional specification of DEGAS is presented and its internal architecture is described. An example is presented that illustrates the potential application domains of the system