This article describes an expert system for hardware synthesis. Details of the target digital system are input to the expert system using very high speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL). The VHDL representation is first translated to a knowledge representation scheme, known as a #x2018;hologram#x2019;, which is a combination of rule, frame and semantic network representation schemes. The hologram representation of the target system is then input to the inference engine, which matches the target system to the knowledge base components and selects an appropriate set for implementation, and connects them creating a digital circuit. The expert system approach results in designs very close to designs from a human designer. In its present form, the system does not perform a design space exploration for alternate designs, but expects the designer to alter the VHDL representation, after observing the results from previous design cycles.
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