The design of complex digital hardware is challenging and error-prone. With short design cycles and increasing complexity of designs, functional verification has become the most expensive and time-consuming aspect of the digital design process. Sequential equivalence checking (SEC) has been proposed as a verification framework to perform a true sequential check of input/output equivalence between two designs. SEC provides several benefits that can enable a faster and more efficient way to design and verify large and complex digital hardware. It can be used to prove that micro-architectural optimizations needed for design closure preserve design functionality, and thus avoid the costly and incomplete functional verification regression traditionally used for such purposes. Moreover, SEC can be used to validate sequential synthesis transformations and thereby enable design and verification at a higher-level of abstraction. Use of sequential synthesis leads to shorter design cycles and can result in a significant improvement in design quality. In this dissertation, we study the problem of sequential redundancy identification to enable robust sequential equivalence checking solutions. In particular, we focus on the use of a transformation-based verification framework to synergistically leverage various transformations to simplify and decompose large problems which arise during sequential redundancy identification to enable an efficient and highly scalable SEC solution. We make five main contributions in this dissertation. First, we introduce a novel sequential redundancy identification framework that dramatically increases the scalability of SEC. Second, we propose the use of a flexible and synergistic set of transformation and verification algorithms for sequential redundancy identification. This more general approach enables greater speed and scalability and identifies a significantly greater degree of redundancy than previous approaches. Third, we introduce the theory and practice of transformation-based verification in the presence of constraints. Constraints are pervasively used in verification testbenches to specify environmental assumptions to prevent illegal input scenarios. Fourth, we develop the theoretical framework with corresponding efficient implementation for optimal sequential redundancy identification in the presence of constraints. Fifth, we address the scalability of transformation-based verification by proposing two new structural abstraction techniques. We also study the synergies between various transformation algorithms and propose new strategies for using these transformations to enable scalable sequential redundancy identification. / text

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Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1992. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-62). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 239-245).

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This thesis describes a new simulation technique, Synchronous Faults Simulation by Surrogate with Exception, first proposed by Dr. F. J. Hill and has been initiated under the direction of Xiolin Wang. This paper reports early results of that project. The Sequential Circuit Test Sequence System, SCIRTSS, is an automatic test generation system which is developed in University of Arizona which will be used as a target to compare against the results of the new simulator. The major objective of this research is to analyze the results obtained by using the new simulator SFSSE against the results obtained by using the parallel simulator SCIRTSS. The results are listed in this paper to verify superiority of the new simulation technique.

While technology has widely been formulated as antithetical to nature, there has been an increased adoption of digital set-ups to promote and enact environmental conservation. This thesis thus examined a range of digital technologies more commonly used for nature-related activities (for example, mobile applications for crowdsourcing data, satellite tracking and mapping facilities, and visual imaging equipment such as cameras and sonar devices) with two objectives. First, at an applied level, the research sought to locate the new set-ups being used, and to unfold the technical, practical and relational issues emerging from this use. Second, at a more abstract level, the research aimed to better understand the sociological implications of deploying these technologies, in terms of the definitions of 'nature' being 'produced' and how the devices might be (re)shaping human-nature relationships. Four areas were studied: wildlife monitoring and recording, public engagement efforts by conservation organisations, conflict management, and digital art production. These contexts form the data chapters of this thesis, and the findings result from an inter-disciplinary qualitative social scientific research enquiry, framed by a constructionist perspective. With regard to the first aim, this research found that the technologies used by organisations and practitioners had the capacity to increase public participation as well as the quantity and quality of nature-related data and information, and could contribute to the formulation of environmental conservation strategies. However, these capacities did not come without issues such as the relegation of public participants to passive roles and struggles over legitimacy in terms of production and interpretation of data wrought from new devices. In relation to the second aim, this research found that digital technological set-ups (re)configured the ways in which wildlife in particular was seen and understood, and revealed both enmeshment and persistent binaries along the emotion/cognition and nature/culture axes. These findings highlight the role of emotions in conservation, and point to increasing complexities in how humans define and relate to nature.

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