This paper introduces the background and motivation for the two special sessions at ISCAS'99. The sessions bring together eight papers, each rooted in the methodology of experimental design, and contributed by collaborating teams of distributed participants. The paper briefly outlines the premises of the companion papers that follow, provides a brief description of a typical experimental design, and introduces a design for archival of data sets and results that are to be readily accessible on the Web. Keywords: design of experiments, circuit equivalence classes, benchmarking. 1 Introduction More than a thousand mathematical problems arising in engineering and science have been shown to be NP-hard. Data sets such as ISCAS'85, ISCAS'89, and extensions introduced at logic and layout synthesis workshops, e.g. [1, 2, 3], are representative of such problems. They have captured a large following of researchers in CAD that `benchmark' their algorithms on various subsets of these data sets --...

OpenExperiment is a user-configurable open environment that supports collaborative experimental design and execution on the Internet. The environment is created with few simple configurations of a generic client. The platform- . . .

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A major component of computer chip design is creating an optimal physical layout of a netlist, i.e., determining where to place the functional elements and how to route the wires connecting them when manufacturing a chip. Because of its basic structure, the overall problem of netlist layout contains many questions that lend themselves to graph theoretical modeling and analysis. We will describe the basic principles of netlist layout and present several graph theoretical questions inherent in the problem. Possible approaches to these questions include concepts from hypergraphs, graph partitioning, graph drawing, graph and geometric thickness, tree width, grid graphs, planar embeddings, and geometric graph theory.