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Title: CRITTER system - an artificial-intelligence approach to digital circuit design critiquing

Thesis/Dissertation ·
OSTI ID:5085442

The CRITTER system is an exploratory prototype digital circuit design aid, built using artificial-intelligence technology, for comprehensive critiquing of digital circuit designs. This critiquing encompasses issues of a circuit's functional correctness, operating speed, timing robustness, and sensitivity to changes in device parameters. In contrast to most circuit design aids, CRITTER is not only concerned with modeling circuit performance, but also with reporting the results of that modeling in the light of the concerns of the circuit designer, i.e., concisely summarizing only those findings it judges to be unexpected or unusual. CRITTER uses a nonprocedural, applicative language to describe real-time circuit behavior, and a predicate calculus notation for expressing an exhaustive set of specifications a circuit must satisfy, including both user-specified requirements and constraints arising as side effects of implementation choices. CRITTER evaluates the satisfaction of all these specifications by a process of symbolic constraint propagation, a generalization of traditional constraint propagation systems which employs symbolic algebra. By detecting, comparing, and classifying all the violated specifications, CRITTER tries to pinpoint design errors and performance bottlenecks. Additionally, CRITTER has a performance bounding approach to evaluating timing specifications in the presence of uncertain timing information.

Research Organization:
Rutgers-the State Univ., New Brunswick, NJ (USA)
OSTI ID:
5085442
Resource Relation:
Other Information: Thesis (Ph. D.)
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English