KNOWLEDGE BASE AND ALGORITHM FOR VLSI DESIGN.

Most VLSI design problems have been shown to be hard combinatorial problems. An overview is given of algorithms and knowledge-based approaches to those problems. Knowledge based systems can increase flexibility in manipulating heuristics. Algorithms are able to provide specific design actions with sophisticated data structure. An integrated system has been developed, where the knowledge-based approach and algorithms are tightly coupled. Experimental results showed that the integrated approach is quite promising for application to practical VLSI design problems.