Associate Professor Valeria Bertacco and Ph.D. student Andrew DeOrio have developed FunSAT, an approach to integrated circuit layout that could help IC designers to optimize chip layout. Envisioned as a multi-player game, the approach would harness humans' abilities to strategize, visualize, and understand complex systems, providing advantages over automated computer-based layout.

A single-player prototype of FunSAT has been implemented in Java by undergraduate student Erica Christensen. Bertacco and DeOrio and working to expand it to a multi-player game, which would allow more complicated problems to be solved.

In addition to speeding up chip design, FunSAT could be used to solve other so-called satisfiability problems – classic and highly complicated mathematical questions that involve selecting the best arrangement of options. In such quandaries, the solver must assign a set of variables to the right true or false categories to fulfill all the constraints of the problem.

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U-M Press Release
Link to Single-Player FunSAT Game Website