The importance of CAD to electronics technology Computer-aided design (CAD) is one way of coping with the problem of how to design and build very complex systems. This problem is particularly acute in electronics technology. Designs are now (1984) said to be design-limited, rather than technology-limited. It can take months to generate a design for a chip, so that it might be obsolete before it can be manufactured. Manual design of large-scale integration (LSI) chips (circa 10,000 gates) is almost impossible. However, using current technology it is possible to produce chips having 250,000 gates. It is understandable, therefore, that there is great interest in improving existing CAD systems. Designers of CAD systems are concerned with formalizing and automating as much of the design task as possible. Automating design of any kind has long been acknowledged as a project fraught with intractable problems. A human designer has to have an understanding of the nature of the materials used in manufacture, a knowledge of common problems and well-tried solutions, and above all, creativity in producing new designs. Understanding, knowledge and creativity are three properties even the most artificially intelligent of computer programs have been entirely lacking in until very recently. Some people would deny computers these qualities entirely, on philosophical grounds (eg Dreyfus 1979; Searle 1981). There are few theories in cognitive psychology which can help.

Handbook of VLSI Chip Design and Expert Systems provides information pertinent to the fundamental aspects of expert systems, which provides a knowledge-based approach to problem solving. This book discusses the use of expert systems in every possible subtask of VLSI chip design as well as in the interrelations between the subtasks. Organized into nine chapters, this book begins with an overview of design automation, which can be identified as Computer-Aided Design of Circuits and Systems (CADCAS). This text then presents the progress in artificial intelligence, with emphasis on expert systems. Other chapters consider the impact of design automation, which exploits the basic capabilities of computers to perform complex calculations and to handle huge amounts of data with a high speed and accuracy. This book discusses as well the characterization of microprocessors. The final chapter deals with interactive I/O devices. This book is a valuable resource for system design experts, circuit analysts and designers, logic designers, device engineers, technologists, and application-specific designers.

This book is written for software engineers, software project leaders, and software managers who would like to introduce a new advanced software technology, expert systems, into their product. Expert system technology brings into programming a new dimension in which "rule of thumb" or heuristic expert knowledge is encoded in the program. In contrast to conventional procedural languages {e. g. , Fortran or C}, expert systems employ high-level programming languages {Le. , expert system shells} that enable us to capture the judgmental knowledge of experts such as geologists, doctors, lawyers, bankers, or insurance underwriters. Past expert systems have been more successfully applied in the problem areas of analysis and synthesis where the boundary of lo;nowledge is well defined and where experts are available and can be identified. Early successful applications include diagnosis systems such as MYCIN, geological systems such as PROSPECTOR, or design/configu ration systems such as XC ON. These early expert systems were mainly applicable to scientific and engineering problems, which are not theoreti cally well understood in terms of decisionmaking processes by their experts and which therefore require judgmental assessment. The more recent expert systems are being applied to sophisticated synthesis problems that involve a large number of choices, such as how the elements are to be compared. These problems normally entailed a large search space and slower speed for the expert systems designed. Examples of these systems include factory scheduling applications such as ISIS, or legal reasoning applications such as TAXMAN.

This book contains papers presented at the sixth International Conference on Application of Artificial Intelligence in Engineering held in Oxford, UK in was held in Southampton, UK July 1991. The first conference in this series the second in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA in 1987, the third in 1986, 1989 in Palo Alto, California, USA in 1988, the fourth in Cambridge, UK in and the fifth in Boston, Massachusetts, USA in 1990. The conference series has now established itself as the unique forum for the presentation of the latest research, development and application of artificial intelligence (AI) in all fields of engineering. Consequently, books of conference proceedings provide a historical record of the application of AI in engineering design, analysis, simulation, planning, scheduling, monitoring, control, diagnosis, reliability and quality, as well as in robotics and manufacturing systems, from the early beginnings to mature applications of today. Whilst previously the field was dominated by knowledge-based systems, in this latest volume, for the first time, a significant proportion of papers cover the paradigms of neural networks and genetic algorithms. Learning and self organising behaviour of systems based on these paradigms are particularly important in engineering applications. From a large number of submitted proposals over sixty papers have been selected by members of the Advisory Committee who acted as referees. Pa pers have been grouped under the following headings.

Artificial Intelligence in Design '91 is a collection of 47 papers from the First International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Design held at Edinburgh in June 1991. The papers in this book are grouped into 13 headings, starting with a background of AI design systems and to which extent AI that results from being used as planning tool be applied to quality-oriented design processes in architecture. A constraint-driven approach to object-oriented design is also shown on real-world objects. The use of CADSYN in the structural design of buildings is examined, along with design-dependent knowledge and design-independent knowledge. Discussions on empowering designers with integrated design environments are given whereby design objects may be retrieved from catalogues without requiring users to form queries. Mention is given to automated adjustment of parameter values frequently used in computer routine applications. The book also introduces the Computer Aided Design (CAD) as applied to architecture. Design representation using data models, non-monotonic reasoning in design, and the cognitive aspects of design using empirical studies are discussed. Topics of the industrial applications of AI in design, such as the needed steps to develop a successful AI-based tool, and a review of the Castlemain Project and telecommunication distribution networks follow. This book is suitable for programmers, computer science students, and architects and engineers who use computers in their line of work.

This book contains the edited versions of papers presented at the 3rd Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, which was held at the University of Ulster at Jordanstown, Northern Ireland on 20-21 September 1990. The main aims of this annual conference are to promote AI research in Ireland, to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas amongst the different disciplines concerned with the study of cognition, and to provide an opportunity for industry to see what research is being carried out in Ireland and how they might benefit from the results of this research. Although most of the partiCipants at the conference came from universities and companies within Ireland, a positive feature of the conference was the extent of interest shown outside of Ireland, resulting in partiCipants from USA, Canada, Austria, and England. The keynote speakers were Professor David Chin, University of Hawaii, and Professor Derek Partridge, University of Exeter, and the topics included machine learning, AI tools and methods, expert systems, speech, vision, natural language, reasoning with uncertain information, and explanation. The sponsors of the conference were Digital Equipment Co (Galway) and the Industrial Development Board for Northern Ireland.