Samples the present state-of-the-art in CAD for VLSI, covering both newly developed algorithms and applications of techniques from the artificial intelligence community. The material is based on a tutorial course run in conjunction with the 1991 European Conference on Circuit Theory and Design, and should interest engineers involved in the design and testing of integrated circuits and systems. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

To fully exploit VLSI technology, future CAD tools need to perform a high proportion of the intelligent decision-making necessary for design. It is imperative that these tasks be massively automated so that the intellectual load on the human designer is reduced, allowing a more efficient use of his time and creative abilities. This book investigates the applicability of knowledge-based techniques to the problems of VLSI design. Topics covered include: an overview of knowledge-based techniques; a description of work illustrating the application of these techniques to various VLSI design tasks; and a survey of workstations and software available for constructing knowledge-based systems. Although much of the material in this book has been illustrated using examples from microelectronic CAD, the issues and techniques have been presented in such a way as to make them useful to managers, designers and researchers who wish to learn of the advantages of knowledge-based techniques in practical applications.

Modern microprocessors such as Intel's Pentium chip typically contain many millions of transistors. They are known generically as Very Large-Scale Integrated (VLSI) systems, and their sheer scale and complexity has necessitated the development of CAD tools to automate their design. This book focuses on the algorithms which are the building blocks of the design automation software which generates the layout of VLSI circuits. Courses on this area are typically elective courses taken at senior undergrad or graduate level by students of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and sometimes in Computer Science, or Computer Engineering.

This book, and the research it describes, resulted from a simple observation we made sometime in 1986. Put simply, we noticed that many VLSI design tools looked "alike". That is, at least at the overall software architecture level, the algorithms and data structures required to solve problem X looked much like those required to solve problem X'. Unfortunately, this resemblance is often of little help in actually writing the software for problem X' given the software for problem X. In the VLSI CAD world, technology changes rapidly enough that design software must continually strive to keep up. And of course, VLSI design software, and engineering design software in general, is often exquisitely sensitive to some aspects of the domain (technology) in which it operates. Modest changes in functionality have an unfortunate tendency to require substantial (and time-consuming) internal software modifications. Now, observing that large engineering software systems are technology dependent is not particularly clever. However, we believe that our approach to xiv Preface dealing with this problem took an interesting new direction. We chose to investigate the extent to which automatic programming ideas cold be used to synthesize such software systems from high-level specifications. This book is one of the results of that effort.

This book provides readers with an up-to-date account of the use of machine learning frameworks, methodologies, algorithms and techniques in the context of computer-aided design (CAD) for very-large-scale integrated circuits (VLSI). Coverage includes the various machine learning methods used in lithography, physical design, yield prediction, post-silicon performance analysis, reliability and failure analysis, power and thermal analysis, analog design, logic synthesis, verification, and neuromorphic design. Provides up-to-date information on machine learning in VLSI CAD for device modeling, layout verifications, yield prediction, post-silicon validation, and reliability; Discusses the use of machine learning techniques in the context of analog and digital synthesis; Demonstrates how to formulate VLSI CAD objectives as machine learning problems and provides a comprehensive treatment of their efficient solutions; Discusses the tradeoff between the cost of collecting data and prediction accuracy and provides a methodology for using prior data to reduce cost of data collection in the design, testing and validation of both analog and digital VLSI designs. From the Foreword As the semiconductor industry embraces the rising swell of cognitive systems and edge intelligence, this book could serve as a harbinger and example of the osmosis that will exist between our cognitive structures and methods, on the one hand, and the hardware architectures and technologies that will support them, on the other....As we transition from the computing era to the cognitive one, it behooves us to remember the success story of VLSI CAD and to earnestly seek the help of the invisible hand so that our future cognitive systems are used to design more powerful cognitive systems. This book is very much aligned with this on-going transition from computing to cognition, and it is with deep pleasure that I recommend it to all those who are actively engaged in this exciting transformation. Dr. Ruchir Puri, IBM Fellow, IBM Watson CTO & Chief Architect, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center