Intelligent Retrieval of Electronic Designs in Online Catalogs
Ivo Vollrath, Peter Oehler · 2002
Design reuse is getting ever more important, especially for designers of electronic circuits. Talking about reuse, many open questions have to be addressed as there are: How to represent and store designs (database management issues)? How to find re-usable designs for a given task? How can a design actually be re-used? How can the copyright of designs ("Intellectual Property", IP) be protected in a global distribution system, while a customer still gets enough information to select a suitable design? This paper describes an intelligent search assistant for Electronic IP catalogs that helps the professional electronic designer in searching for a reusable IP for his specific application. The retrieval methods of this assistant are based on Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) techniques but incorporate some approaches that are new to most other CBR systems. Special care is taken to protect the intellectual property of IP designers while application designers are still provided the possibility to s...