Heuristic Search for New Microcircuit Structures: An Application of Artificial Intelligence

Three experiments have been conducted, and some novel designs and design rules have emerged. The paradigm for Eurisko's exploration is a loop in which it generates a new device configuration, computes its I/O behavior, tries to "parse" this into a functionally it already knows about and can use, and then evaluates the results. In the first experiment, this loop took place at the level of charged carriers moving under the effects of electric fields through abutted regions of doped and undoped semiconductors. This was unsurprising, as they were short sentences in the descriptive language we had defined (a language with verbs like Abut and ApplyEField, and with nouns like nDoped Region and IntrinsicChannellRegion).