<p>Creating an IC (Integrated Circuit) can be very time consuming if high flexibility of the construction is demanded. This report will try to solve this problem by creating own standard cell libraries, which in turn are more flexible since the user designs them. Having these libraries makes it possible to map VHDL or Verilog code to those libraries, using them instead of predefined cell libraries. The procedure of creating the libraries is quite time consuming, and thus the possibilities of making that procedure automatic, or as automatic as possible, has been examined. Unfortunately some manual labour has to be done, butthe process can be speeded up a lot by making parts of it automatic.</p>

Creating an IC (Integrated Circuit) can be very time consuming if high flexibility of the construction is demanded. This report will try to solve this problem by creating own standard cell libraries, which in turn are more flexible since the user designs them. Having these libraries makes it possible to map VHDL or Verilog code to those libraries, using them instead of predefined cell libraries. The procedure of creating the libraries is quite time consuming, and thus the possibilities of making that procedure automatic, or as automatic as possible, has been examined. Unfortunately some manual labour has to be done, butthe process can be speeded up a lot by making parts of it automatic.

Power system frequency is one of the key performance indices of system operation. Abnormal frequency deviations would incur negative impacts to power equipments and service quality. Thus, it is important to operate and regulate the system frequency within an acceptable range. North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has been using a Control Performance Standard (CPS) for frequency control performance assessment since 1997 which uses system frequency and inter--area power flow to evaluate the power system control performance. This thesis presents a design of CPS for isolated system and the results of Taiwan Power Company frequency control performance based on the proposed CPS1 formulation.

Code optimization or code transformation is a complex function of a compiler involving analyses and modifications with the entire program as its scope. In spite of its complexity, hardly any tools exist to support this function of the compiler. This thesis presents the development of a code transformation system, specifically for scalar transformations, which can be used either as a tool to assist the generation of code transformers or as an environment for experimentation with code transformations. The development of the code transformation system involves the formal specification of code transformations using dependence relations. We have written formal specifications for the whole class of traditional scalar transformations, including induction variable elimination - a complex transformation - for which no formal specifications are available in the literature. All transformations considered in this thesis are global. Most of the specifications given here, for which specifications are already available in the literature, are improved versions, in terms of conservativeness.The study of algorithms for code transformations, in the context of their formal specification, lead us to the development of a new algorithm for partial redundancy elimination. The basic idea behind the algorithm is the new concepts of safe partial availability and safe partial anticipability. Our algorithm is computationally and lifetime optimal. It works on flow graphs whose nodes are basic blocks, which makes it practical.In comparison with existing algorithms the new algorithm also requires four unidirectional analyses, but saves some preprocessing time. The main advantage of the algorithm is its conceptual simplicity. The code transformation system provides an environment in which one can specify a transformation using dependence relations (in the specification language we have designed), generate code for a transformer from its specification,and experiment with the generated transformers on real-world programs. The system takes a program to be transformed, in C or FORTRAN, as input,translates it into intermediate code, interacts with the user to decide the transformation to be performed, computes the necessary dependence relations using the dependence analyzer, applies the specified transformer on the intermediate code, and converts the transformed intermediate code back to high-level. The system is unique of its kind,providing a complete environment for the generation of code transformers, and allowing experimentations with them using real-world programs.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T15:57:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo3220_1.pdf: 1307302 bytes, checksum: 42435c33fd14be36778e3c202d24fd2d (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010 / A maioria das empresas utiliza a linguagem natural livre para documentar software, desde os seus requisitos, até os casos de uso e testes usados para verificar o produto final. Visto que as fases de análise, projeto, implementação e teste do sistema dependem essencialmente dessa documentação, é preciso assegurar inicialmente a qualidade desses textos. Contudo, textos escritos em linguagem natural nem sempre são precisos, devido ao fenômeno da ambigüidade (léxica e estrutural), podendo dar margem a diferentes interpretações. Uma alternativa para se minimizar esse problema é o uso de uma Linguagem Natural Controlada - um subconjunto de alguma língua natural, que usa um vocabulário restrito a um domínio particular, e regras gramaticais que guiam a construção de sentenças com redução de ambigüidade semântica visando padronização e precisão dos textos. Este trabalho, na área de Teste de Software, apresenta a ucsCNL (Use Case Specification CNL), uma Linguagem Natural Controlada para escrever especificações de casos de uso no domínio de dispositivos móveis. A ucsCNL foi integrada à TaRGeT (Test and Requirements Generation Tool), uma ferramenta para geração automática de casos de teste funcionais baseados em cenários de casos de uso escritos em Inglês. A ucsCNL provê um ambiente para geração de casos de teste mais claros, com ambigüidade reduzida, influindo diretamente na qualidade dos testes e na produtividade dos testadores. A ucsCNL já está em uso e tem alcançado resultados satisfatórios

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A Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) is used to generate a signal with a frequency that is a function of an input voltage amplitude, and is an integral part of circuits such as phase locked loops, frequency synthesizers, down conversion receivers, and clock generators. A typical design flow for a VCO involves architecture selection based on specification, calculation of circuit parameters, simulation, and iterations of circuit parameters based on the simulation result. In such a design flow, changes in specification or process can lead to significant redesign. This report focuses on a C++ based LC VCO generation software that seeks to automate the design process and that includes calculation of circuit parameters, creation of Spectre netlist, invocation of simulation, automated checking of the result, and a feedback mechanism to modify circuit parameters until the design can converge to the desired specification. Object Oriented Programming principles such as inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, class abstraction are exercised to maximize reusability and portability to other projects which may require different foundry device models and supply voltages. / text

In this modern era many educational institutes and business organisations are adopting the e-Learning approach as it provides an effective method for educating and testing their students and staff. The continuous development in the area of information technology and increasing use of the internet has resulted in a huge global market and rapid growth for e-Learning. Multiple Choice Tests (MCTs) are a popular form of assessment and are quite frequently used by many e-Learning applications as they are well adapted to assessing factual, conceptual and procedural information. In this thesis, we present an alternative to the lengthy and time-consuming activity of developing MCTs by proposing a Natural Language Processing (NLP) based approach that relies on semantic relations extracted using Information Extraction to automatically generate MCTs. Information Extraction (IE) is an NLP field used to recognise the most important entities present in a text, and the relations between those concepts, regardless of their surface realisations. In IE, text is processed at a semantic level that allows the partial representation of the meaning of a sentence to be produced. IE has two major subtasks: Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE). In this work, we present two unsupervised RE approaches (surface-based and dependency-based). The aim of both approaches is to identify the most important semantic relations in a document without assigning explicit labels to them in order to ensure broad coverage, unrestricted to predefined types of relations. In the surface-based approach, we examined different surface pattern types, each implementing different assumptions about the linguistic expression of semantic relations between named entities while in the dependency-based approach we explored how dependency relations based on dependency trees can be helpful in extracting relations between named entities. Our findings indicate that the presented approaches are capable of achieving high precision rates. Our experiments make use of traditional, manually compiled corpora along with similar corpora automatically collected from the Web. We found that an automatically collected web corpus is still unable to ensure the same level of topic relevance as attained in manually compiled traditional corpora. Comparison between the surface-based and the dependency-based approaches revealed that the dependency-based approach performs better. Our research enabled us to automatically generate questions regarding the important concepts present in a domain by relying on unsupervised relation extraction approaches as extracted semantic relations allow us to identify key information in a sentence. The extracted patterns (semantic relations) are then automatically transformed into questions. In the surface-based approach, questions are automatically generated from sentences matched by the extracted surface-based semantic pattern which relies on a certain set of rules. Conversely, in the dependency-based approach questions are automatically generated by traversing the dependency tree of extracted sentence matched by the dependency-based semantic patterns. The MCQ systems produced from these surface-based and dependency-based semantic patterns were extrinsically evaluated by two domain experts in terms of questions and distractors readability, usefulness of semantic relations, relevance, acceptability of questions and distractors and overall MCQ usability. The evaluation results revealed that the MCQ system based on dependency-based semantic relations performed better than the surface-based one. A major outcome of this work is an integrated system for MCQ generation that has been evaluated by potential end users.

Esta dissertação investiga o processo de conversão automática de textos estruturados para hiperdocumentos. Analisa vantagens e desvantagens da utilização de um processo automático. Faz um levantamento detalhado das etapas envolvidas nesta conversão. Como resultado da pesquisa propõe um processo de conversão baseado em definições formais da estrutura dos documentos e das citações. O domínio de aplicação do processo de conversão é o conjunto de normas estatutárias jurídicas brasileiras. Outro resultado deste trabalho é a ferramenta WebifyLaw que implementa o processo de conversão automática para o conjunto das normas estatutárias jurídicas brasileiras. Os resultados da aplicação da WebifyLaw na Constituição Federal, no Código Civil e no Código de Processo Civil e em outras 42 normas são apresentados e discutidos. / This work centered in the research of the automatic conversion of structured texts into hyperdocuments. It presents an analysis concerning the advantages and disadvantages of such automatic process. It also details the steps involved in this conversion. As one of the results it proposes an automatic conversion process, which is based on document structure and citations´ formal definitions. The application domain is set as Brazilian statutory norms. Another contribution from this work is a tool called WebifyLaw, which implements the automatic conversion process for the chosen domain. The tool was applied to the Brazilian Constitution, the Civil Code among other 42 norms. The results obtained in using this application are also presented and discussed.

Este trabalho apresenta o desenvolvimento de um fluxo de projeto de circuitos digitais integrados, visando a incluir células geradas automaticamente pela ferramenta ASTRAN. Como parte integrante deste novo fluxo, desenvolveu-se uma nova técnica de comparação entre células, utilizando Redes Neurais Artificiais, para a modelagem das células ASTRAN, esta técnica se mostrou flexível ao se adaptar a diversos tipos de células e com resultados robustos tendo 5% de desvio padrão e 4% para o erro relativo. Também, foi criada uma ferramenta capaz de substituir células comerciais por células ASTRAN, tendo como objetivo melhorar as características de potência consumida e área utilizada pelo circuito, e por fim gerando um circuito misto composto de células comerciais feitas à mão e células ASTRAN geradas automaticamente. O foco principal deste trabalho encontra-se na integração do fluxo de geração de células geradas automaticamente a um fluxo de síntese comercial de circuitos digitais. Os resultados obtidos mostraram-se promissores, obtendo-se ganhos em redução de área e potência dos circuitos analisados. Em média os circuitos tiveram uma redução de 3,77% na potência consumida e 1,25% menos área utilizada. Com um acréscimo de 0,64% por parte do atraso total do circuito. / This work presents the development of a design flow for digital integrated circuits, including cells generated automatically by the ASTRAN tool. Moreover, a new technique, using Artificial Neural Networks, was developed to perform a comparison between two different cells, i.e. commercial and ASTRAN’s cell. This technique proved to be flexible when adapting to several types of cells and with robust results having 5% of standard deviation and 4% for relative error. Also, a new tool was developed, capable of performing cell replacement between ASTRAN and commercial cells, to improve power consumption an used area. Finally a mixed circuit composed of handmade commercial cells and cells automatically generated by ASTRAN was generated. A target was to mix an automatic cell synthesis tool with commercial synthesis tools dedicated to standard cells. Comparisons have shown that our approach was able to produce satisfactory results related area and power consumption. In average the circuits had a reduction of 3.77% in the power consumed and 1.25% less used area. With an increase of 0.64% due to the total delay of the circuit.