Parsing electronic circuits in a logic grammar

Understanding circuits is a prerequisite for circuit design and trouble shooting. Circuit understanding by engineers is described as a process that starts with a structural analysis and then proceeds to a causal analysis. As a step toward automatic circuit understanding, a method for analyzing circuit structures is presented. In this method, a circuit is reviewed as a sentence and its elements as words. Circuit structures are defined by rules written in a logic grammar called definite clause set grammar (DCSG). Given circuits are decomposed into parse trees by the DCSG top-down parsing mechanism. These parse trees represent hierarchical structures of functional blocks. This representation is presented as one step in the process of automatic understanding of circuit structures