At The Cross Roads: Looking Both Ways

A decade ago, state-of-the-art CAD systems helped with the art work for thousands of transistors. Today they are suggesting system architectures, diagnosing hardware faults, and learning design rules. Most of today's systems use a static design process to solve a speci c problem. In tomorrow's systems, the design process must evolve dynamically with the design artifact to solve general problems. In my keynote address, I will retrace the rocky paths carved out by earlier applications of AI to CAD, emphasizing the challenges that lie on the road ahead.