Expert system and knowledge acquisition technologies in electronic design automation

The rapid improvements in semiconductor technology has been coupled with a shortening of product life-cycles. Both of these trends has produced pressure to improve the efficiency of the design process. Because of the complexity of most design problems, it has not been possible to apply traditional programming techniques in solving many of the emerging design problems associated with using ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) without making a great deal of simplifying assumptions or accepting solutions that are far from optimal. Recently, expert system techniques that rely on task-specific knowledge have been very successfully applied in the design area. However, because these expert systems rely on large amounts of domain knowledge for their problem-solving power, a different set of issues must be addressed in building these systems as compared to writing traditional programs. The author examines the trends in the use of expert systems and the associated problem of knowledge acquisition in several areas of ASIC design