Digital designs are often very large and complex, this makes locating and fixing a bug very hard and time consuming. Often more than half of the development time is spent on verification. Assertion based verification is a method that uses assertions that can help to improve the verification time. Simulating with assertions provides more information that can be used to locate and correct a bug. In this master thesis assertions are discussed and implemented in Senior DSP processor.

Recent epistemology has been dominated by the knowledge first approach championed by Timothy Williamson and others, and its influence continues to grow, spreading into the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and beyond. Proponents of the knowledge first approach have argued for the centrality and importance of knowledge in these areas of philosophy by arguing that there is something wrong with asserting or believing something that one doesn’t know, that assertion and belief are to be understood in terms of knowledge, and that a knowledge‐maximizing principle of charity is constitutive of the contents of one’s assertions and beliefs. I attack the knowledge first approach by developing more plausible accounts of assertion, belief, and the determination of content that break these supposed ties with knowledge. / text

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The Property Specification Language (PSL) is an IEEE standard which allows developers to specify precise behavioral properties of hardware designs. PSL assertions can be embedded within code written in hardware description languages (HDL) such as Verilog to monitor signals of interest. Debugging simulations at the register transfer level (RTL) is often required to verify the functionality of a design before synthesis. Traditional methods of RTL debugging can help locate failures, but do not necessarily immediately help in discovering the reasons for the failures. The P2VSim tool presents the ability to combine multiple Verilog signals not only instantaneously, but also across multiple clock cycles, producing a graphical display of the state of active PSL assertions in a given RTL simulation. When using the P2VSim tool, users will write PSL assertions directly into their Verilog source files. After the tool searches for and loads the embedded assertions, execution trace monitors for the relevant Verilog signals are dynamically generated and written back into the Verilog source code. P2VSim then invokes an RTL simulator, Modelsim, to generate a simulation execution trace, requiring that the designer has some hardware or software testbench already in place. Next, the input PSL assertions are parsed into time intervals that have logical and temporal properties. These intervals are to be displayed graphically when PSL property checking is performed. Finally, the user is allowed to step through simulation one cycle at a time, while the tool applies the simulation execution trace to the instantiated time intervals, performing PSL property checking at each clock cycle. From this, the user can witness the exact clock cycles when PSL assertions are satisfied or violated, along with the causes of such results.

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In my dissertation I explain and defend the claim that conscious beliefs are essentially prescriptive. I argue that norms of conscious belief are explained by the fact that consciously believing p involves a commitment to the truth of p, a commitment analogous to the one involved in the act of accepting an assertion in public linguistic practice. Having a conscious belief implies being vulnerable to certain questions and criticisms from other agents. For instance, when asked for reasons for her belief, a person should provide a justification which demonstrates her entitlement to accepting the given proposition as true. Moreover, if a certain belief logically follows from the agent’s beliefs then she should either accept it as a conclusion or revise her initial beliefs. I argue that both deliberative and non-inferential conscious beliefs can be construed as acceptances of assertions and that they carry the same normative import as public acts of accepting claims put forward by others. The intrinsic relation between conscious belief and language-use shows that conscious belief is irreducible to unconscious or lower-level belief, the type of belief which we attribute to non-human animals or small children. Rather than trying to reduce conscious belief to lower-level belief, I suggest that we should offer an account of the emergence of the linguistic practice of assertion in terms of animal belief and then explain the normative features of conscious belief by reference to the norms implicit in assertional practice. In addition, my work proposes a way of formulating the norms of conscious belief which is consistent with the fact that actual human beings do not have perfect logical abilities; that they can only dedicate a limited amount of time and cognitive resources to the task of reasoning.

The most time-consuming component of designing and launching hardware products to market is the verification of Integrated Circuits (IC). An effective way of verifying a design can be achieved by adding assertions to the design. Automatic translation of hardware specifications from natural language to assertions in a formal representation has the potential to improve the verification productivity of ICs. However, natural language specifications have the characteristics of being imprecise, incomplete, and ambiguous. An automation framework can benefit verification engineers only if it is designed with the right balance between the ease of expression and precision of meaning allowed for in the input natural language specifications. This requirement introduces two major challenges for designing an effective translation framework. The first challenge is to allow the processing of expressive specifications with flexible word order variations and sentence structures. The second challenge is to assist users in writing unambiguous and complete specifications in the English language that can be accurately translated. In this dissertation, we address the first challenge by modeling semantic parsing of the input sentence as a game of BINGO that can capture the combinatorial nature of natural language semantics. BINGO parsing considers the context of each word in the input sentence to ensure high precision in the creation of semantic frames. We address the second challenge by designing a suggestion and feedback framework to assist users in writing clear and coherent specifications. Our feedback generates different ways of writing acceptable sentences when the input sentence is not understood. We evaluated our BINGO model on 316 hardware design specifications taken from the documents of AMBA, memory controller, and UART architectures. The results showed that highly expressive specifications could be handled in our BINGO model. It also demonstrated the ease of creating rules to generate the same semantic frame for specifications with the same meaning but different word order. We evaluated the suggestion and rewriting framework on 132 erroneous specifications taken from AMBA and memory controller architectures documents. Our system generated suggestions for all the specs. On manual inspection, we found that 87% of these suggestions were semantically closer to the intent of the input specification. Moreover, automatic contextual analysis of the rewritten form of the input specification allowed the translation of the input specification with different words and different order of words that were not defined in our grammar. / Doctor of Philosophy / The most time-consuming component of designing and launching hardware products to market is the verification of hardware circuits. An effective way of verifying a design is to add programming codes called assertions in the design. The creation of assertions can be time-consuming and error-prone due to the technical details needed to write assertions. Automatically translating assertion specifications written in English to program code can reduce design time and errors since the English language hides away the technical details required for writing assertions. However, sentences written in English language can have multiple and incomplete interpretations. It becomes difficult for machines to understand assertions written in the English language. In this work, we automatically generate assertions from assertion descriptions written in English. We propose techniques to write rules that can accurately translate English specifications to assertions. Our rules allow a user to write specifications with flexible use of word order and word interpretations. We have tested the understanding framework on English specifications taken from four different types of hardware design architectures. Since we cannot create rules to understand all possible ways of writing a specification, we have proposed a suggestion framework that can inform the user about the words and word structures acceptable to our translation framework. The suggestion framework was tested on specifications of AMBA and memory controller architectures.

La fibromyalgie est un trouble qui intéresse la médecine somatique, dont le principal signe relève des douleurs chroniques et diffuses qui s’additionnent ou se déplacent dans l’ensemble du corps et de ses organes. L’absence de possibilité d’imagerie médicale à l’assise de ce trouble rend la parole du patient nécessaire pour l’établissement de son diagnostic.Nous nous intéressons à l’équivoque de cette parole, notamment avec le principe de l’assertion subjective. Dans ce contexte, la théorisation psychosomatique sera critiquée dans la réduction qu’elle autorise entre les sphères psychique et somatique. Nous questionnons également la dynamique transférentielle, au travers de la distinction entre l’angoisse et l’effroi.La parole du patient et le contexte médical de la fibromyalgie invitent à interroger la théorisation lacanienne des quatre discours. Il n’en reste que deux : celui du médecin sur le mode universitaire – il a créé le maître comme une ombre factice – et celui du patient sur le mode hystérique – dont l’analyste se fait l’écho. Nous détournons également les dimensions Réel-Symbolique-Imaginaire en restituant leur ordonnancement I.S.R. au fil de l’histoire du patient. / The fibromyalgia is a disorder which interests the somatic medicine, of which the main sign raiseschronic and diffuse pains which add up or move in the whole of the body and of its organs. The absence of possibility of medical imaging in the basis of this disorder returns the word of the patient necessity for the establishment of its diagnosis.We are interested in the ambiguity of this word, in particular with the principle of the subjective assertion. In this context, the psychosomatic theorization will be criticized in the reduction which it authorizes between the psychic and somatic spheres. We also question the transférentielle dynamics, through the distinction between the anxiety and the dismay.The word of the patient and the medical context of the fibromyalgia invite to question the Lacanian theorization of four speeches. There is there only two: that of the doctor on the university mode - He(it) created master as an artificial shadow - and that of the patient on the hysteric mode - which the analyst echoes. We also divert the dimensions Réel-Symbolique-Imaginaire by restoring their sequencing I. S. R. in the course of the story of the patient.

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