Capturing Designer Expertise The CGEN System

Knowledge-based systems are becoming pervasive in the computer-aided design area. For these systems to achieve satisfactory levels of performance large amounts of knowledge are necessary; however, the acquisition of knowledge is a difficult task. Automated knowledge-acquisition tools (AKAT) provide capabilities for quickly building and maintaining knowledge-bases. This paper describes CGEN, a tool which allows hardware designers, unfamiliar with artificial intelligence, to deposit their expertise into a knowledge-base. A set of experiments which tested CGEN´s capabilities are presented. The experiments demonstrate hardware designers can produce high quality knowledge-bases using CGEN.