Representations for Reasoning about Digital Circuits

We are interested in developing programs that reason about digital electronic circuits, in order to design, redesign, and debug them. The first step toward developing such programs is to determine a useful way of representing the design and operation of circuits. A useful representation must make apparent the roles of various circuit components in implementing the overall circuit function, and must allow a program to reason about the operation of the circuit at various levels of abstraction. This paper summarizes our efforts to develop such a representation This work is closely related to other Al work on representing plans and on representing and reasoning about complex physical processes.