A system based on Artificial Intelligence techniques is presented that is aimed at providing an integrated and efficient environment for the development of Expert Systems oriented to the assistance to VLSI circuit design. The system DE-GAS, DEsiGn Assistant, has its knowledge base structured in terms of rules which use an easily extensible set of primitives to implement the selection of objects and to execute actions upon them. The structural flexibility thus achieved greatly enhances the easiness of the task of developping Expert Systems. After a brief justification of the option for Expert Systems in our application context, the functional specification of DEGAS is presented and its internal architecture is described. An example is presented that ilustrates the potential application domains to which the system is vocationated.

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