Improving digital circuit simulation: a knowledge based approach

The simulation of digital logic circuits is a common practice in design automation. Because of advances in integrated circuit technology, currently available digital circuit simulator can not model all circuit behavior. Combining artificial intelligence and simulation techniques, a knowledge based simulator was designed and constructed to model non-standard circuit behavior. Circuit designer expertise on behavioral phenomena is used to diagnose, analyze, and emulate this behavior in the knowledge based simulator. An expert system guides the base simulator by manipulating its events in order to achieve the desired behavior. This paper focuses on the prototype system architecture which integrates features of a an event-driven gate-level simulator and features of the multiple expert system architecture, HEARSAY-II.