A new CAD tool for digital combinatorial circuit design called DiCES and based on artificial intelligence techniques has been developed. It includes a logic synthesizer and minimizer to synthesize and simplify Boolean expressions with an arbitrary number of variables. A rule-based forward-driven expert subsystem is also provided to select the technology and design approach that best satisfy the user's design criteria, including minimization of area/number of gates, propagation delay/speed, cost/number of inputs, power dissipation, and flexibility/ease of modification. The system is implemented in Franz Lisp, running under Vax/Unix on a Vax 11 750. The results which are included in this paper show that DiCES yields excellent simplified circuits at the expense of execution speed. Technology and design approach results are also satisfactory. 1990.
