KNOWLEDGE-BASED VLSI ROUTING SYSTEM WIREX.

This paper describes a new interactive routing system for VLSI layout design based on artificial intelligence techniques. 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 system proposed here adopts a knowledge-based method and relieves a designer from the burden of complicated design operations. This system 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 result.