Introduction

Almost every appliance used in daily life has an integrated circuit as a control unit. This applies not only to a modern television or a washing machine but also to cars or airplanes where security critical tasks are controlled by circuits. Up to several 100 million gates are contained in such an integrated circuit — also called “chip”. Moreover, the number of elements that are composed into a single chip doubles every 18 months according to Moore’s Law. This causes an exponentially increasing size of the problem instances that have to be handled during circuit design. Techniques and tools for computer-aided design (CAD) are available to create such complex systems. But often the tool development does not keep up with the progress in fabrication techniques. The “design gap” is resulting, i.e. the size of the circuits that can be produced increases faster than the productivity of the design process.