The Use of Equality in Deduction and Knowledge Representation

This report describes a system which maintains canonical expressions for designators under a set of equalities. Substitution is used to maintain all knowledge in terms of these canonical expressions. A partial order on designators, termed the better-name relation, is used in the choice of canonical expressions. It is shown that with an appropriate better-name relation an important engineering reasoning technique, propagation of constraints, can be implemented as a special case of this substitution process. Special purpose algebraic simplification procedures are embedded such that they interact effectively with the equality system. An electrical circuit analysis system is developed which relies upon constraint propagation and algebraic simplification as primary reasoning techniques. The reasoning is guided by a better-name relation in which referentially transparent terms are preferred to referentially opaque ones. Multiple description of subcircuits are shown to interact strongly with the reasoning mechanism.

Qualitative Analysis of MOS Circuits

With the push towards sub-micron technology, transistor models have become increasingly complex. The number of components in integrated circuits has forced designer's efforts and skills towards higher levels of design. This has created a gap between design expertise and the performance demands increasingly imposed by the technology. To alleviate this problem, software tools must be developed that provide the designer with expert advice on circuit performance and design. This requires a theory that links the intuitions of an expert circuit analyst with the corresponding principles of formal theory (i.e. algebra, calculus, feedback analysis, network theory, and electrodynamics), and that makes each underlying assumption explicit.

Causal and Teleological Reasoning in Circuit Recognition

This thesis presents a theory of human-like reasoning in the general domain of designed physical systems, and in particular, electronic circuits. One aspect of the theory, causal analysis, describes how the behavior of individual components can be combined to explain the behavior of composite systems. Another aspect of the theory, teleological analysis, describes how the notion that the system has a purpose can be used to aid this causal analysis. The theory is implemented as a computer program, which, given a circuit topology, can construct by qualitative causal analysis a mechanism graph describing the functional topology of the system. This functional topology is then parsed by a grammar for common circuit functions. Ambiguities are introduced into the analysis by the approximate qualitative nature of the analysis. For example, there are often several possible mechanisms which might describe the circuit's function. These are disambiguated by teleological analysis. The requirement that each component be assigned an appropriate purpose in the functional topology imposes a severe constraint which eliminates all the ambiguities. Since both analyses are based on heuristics, the chosen mechanism is a rationalization of how the circuit functions, and does not guarantee that the circuit actually does function. This type of coarse understanding of circuits is useful for analysis, design and troubleshooting.

A Circuit Grammar For Operational Amplifier Design

Electrical circuit designers seldom create really new topologies or use old ones in a novel way. Most designs are known combinations of common configurations tailored for the particular problem at hand. In this thesis I show that much of the behavior of a designer engaged in such ordinary design can be modelled by a clearly defined computational mechanism executing a set of stylized rules. Each of my rules embodies a particular piece of the designer's knowledge. A circuit is represented as a hierarchy of abstract objects, each of which is composed of other objects. The leaves of this tree represent the physical devices from which physical circuits are fabricated. By analogy with context-free languages, a class of circuits is generated by a phrase-structure grammar of which each rule describes how one type of abstract object can be expanded into a combination of more concrete parts. Circuits are designed by first postulating an abstract object which meets the particular design requirements. This object is then expanded into a concrete circuit by successive refinement using rules of my grammar. There are in general many rules which can be used to expand a given abstract component. Analysis must be done at each level of the expansion to constrain the search to a reasonable set. Thus the rule of my circuit grammar provide constraints which allow the approximate qualitative analysis of partially instantiated circuits. Later, more careful analysis in terms of more concrete components may lead to the rejection of a line of expansion which at first looked promising. I provide special failure rules to direct the repair in this case.