Design Assistant: an expert tool for ASIC design

The Design Assistant is an expert tool used for high-level what-if considerations from the very early stages of a design up to the point where the design capture is complete. It works on a high-level structural representation of a design so that it can be used before any logic is captured, and it supports a real top-down design approach with a refinement mechanism. Its goal is to answer questions such as: How big will this circuit be? What will the power dissipation be? Will it fit on a gate-array? Which package should I use? Should the design use one or two chips? The tool, a collection of designers' expertise, has been built on the top of a Prolog expert system containing all the technical data and estimation rules and providing a powerful and flexible environment.<
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