AI APPROACH TO VLSI ROUTING PROBLEM.

This paper describes a new interactive routing system based on artificial intelligence technique. In the VLSI routing problem, most of the time is spent on the interactive design operations to get the complete connection after automatic routing. An expert designer has to delete, modify or draw routing patterns on the display terminals by exploiting his own specific knowledge and experience. This interactive process is done in a trial and error manner, and usually takes a lot of design time. The proposed system adopts a rule-based method and enables a designer to relieve the burden from complicated design operations. This system accepts the designer's knowledge in clausal form of the first order predicate logic, Prolog language. This rule-based routing system has been developed to solve a large scale real problem of a few thousand gate VLSI, and showed promising results.