KNOWLEDGE-BASED VLSI ROUTING SYSTEM - WIREX.

This paper describes a new interactive routing system for VLSI layout design based on artificial intelligence techniques. The system adopts a knowledge-based method and relieves a designer from the burden of complicated design operations. It accepts the designer's knowledge as a set of rules represented in Prolog language. The Prolog interpreter interprets the rules and makes inference on the knowledge. This knowledge-based routing system has been developed to solve a large-scale real problem. It has been applied to design custom VLSIs with several thousand gates and has shown quite promising results.