Over the last two decades, chip design has been conducted at the register transfer (RT) Level using Hardware Descriptive Languages (HDL), such as VHDL and Verilog. The modeling at the behavioral level not only allows for better representation and understanding of the design, but also allows for encapsulation of the sub-modules as well, thus increasing productivity. Despite these benefits, validating a RTL design is not necessarily easier. Today, design validation is considered one of the most time and resource consuming aspects of hardware design. The high costs associated with late detection of bugs can be enormous. Together with stringent time to market factors, the need to guarantee the correct functionality of the design is more critical than ever. The work done in this thesis tackles the problem of RTL design validation and presents new frameworks for functional test generation. We use branch coverage as our metric to evaluate the quality of the generated test stimuli. The initial effort for test generation utilized simulation based techniques because of their scalability with design size and ease of use. However, simulation based methods work on input spaces rather than the DUT's state space and often fail to traverse very narrow search paths in large input spaces. To encounter this problem and enhance the ability of test generation framework, in the following work in this thesis, certain design semantics are statically extracted and recurrence relationships between different variables are mined. Information such as relations among variables and loops can be extremely valuable from test generation point of view. The simulation based method is hybridized with Z3 based symbolic backward execution engine with feedback among different stages. The hybridized method performs loop abstraction and is able to traverse narrow design paths without performing costly circuit analysis or explicit loop unrolling. Also structural and functional unreachable branches are identified during the process of test generation. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques are able to achieve high branch coverage on several ITC'99 benchmark circuits and their modified variants, with significant speed up and reduction in the sequence length. / Master of Science

Orientador: Maria Aparecida Diniz Ehrhardt / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Matemática Estatística e Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-22T06:10:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ferreira_DeiseGoncalves_M.pdf: 2631020 bytes, checksum: 45eb84901394375843735b1fdef599ad (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: Neste trabalho voltamos nossa atenção para métodos de otimização que não fazem uso de derivadas. Dentre esses, estamos interessadas em um método de busca padrão para minimização de funções com restrições lineares. Abordamos um algoritmo proposto por Lewis e Torczon, cuja ideia geral é que o padrão deve conter direções de busca ao longo das quais iterações factíveis sejam determinadas. O algoritmo possui resultados de convergência global. Realizamos sua implementação computacional, e propomos novas estratégias de busca e atualização do tamanho do passo, além de um novo padrão de direções de busca. Realizamos testes numéricos, de modo a analisar o desempenho das estratégias propostas e comparar o desempenho do padrão de direções que introduzimos com o proposto por Lewis e Torczon / Abstract: In this work, our interest lies on derivative-free optimization methods. Among these, our aim is to study a pattern search method for linearly constrained minimization. We studied an algorithm proposed by Lewis and Torsion, whose general idea is that the pattern must contain search directions in which feasible iterations must be computed. The algorithm has global convergence results. We accomplished its computational implementation and we propose new strategies of search and updating rule for the step-length control parameter. We also propose a new pattern of search directions. We accomplished numerical experiments in order to analyze the performance of our proposals and also to compare the performance of our pattern with the one proposed by Lewis and Torczon / Mestrado / Matematica Aplicada / Mestra em Matemática Aplicada

Orientador: Maria Aparecida Diniz Ehrhardt / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Matemática Estatística e Computação Científica / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-22T15:48:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Cervelin_BrunoHenrique_M.pdf: 1935510 bytes, checksum: 91d17dd60bdd280c9eddd301cb3d2c24 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar alguns métodos de minimização irrestrita sem derivadas, tais como, Nelder-Mead, busca padrão e SID-PSM, assim como compará-los. Ainda pretendemos apresentar o problema de otimização de parâmetros de algoritmos, e aplicar o método SID-PSM de modo a encontrar parâmetros ótimos para o próprio método SID-PSM em relação ao número de avaliações de função que o método realiza. Os experimentos numéricos realizados mostram que o SID-PSM _e mais robusto e mais eficiente que os métodos clássicos sem derivadas (busca padrão e Nelder-Mead). Outros experimentos nos mostram o potencial do problema de otimização de parâmetros de algoritmos em melhorar tanto a eficiência quanto a robustez dos métodos / Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present some derivative-free methods for unconstrained minimization problems, such as Nelder-Mead, pattern search and SID-PSM, and compare them. We also intend to present the problem of optimal algorithmic parameters, and apply the method SID-PSM in order to find optimal parameters for the method SID-PSM itself in relation to the number of function evaluations performed by the method. The numerical experiments performed show that the SID-PSM is more robust and more efficient than the classical derivative-free methods (pattern search and Nelder-Mead). Other experiments show us the potential of the problem of optimal algorithmic parameters to improve both the efficiency and the robustness of the methods / Mestrado / Matematica Aplicada / Mestre em Matemática Aplicada