1,720,969 research outputs found
DETECTive: Machine Learning-driven Automatic Test Pattern Prediction for Faults in Digital Circuits
Due to the continuous technology scaling and the ever-increasing complexity and size of the hardware designs, manufacturing defects have become a key obstacle in meeting end-user demand. Despite decades of research, traditional test-generation techniques often struggle to scale to massive and complex designs. Such scalability issues stem from the numerous backtracking the traditional test generation techniques perform before converging to a test pattern. In this work, we present DETECTive that leverages deep learning on graphs to learn fault characteristics and predict test pattern(s) to expose faults without requiring backtracking. DETECTive is trained on small circuits, and its learned knowledge is transferable to predict test patterns for circuits that contain up to 29x more gates than the training circuits. Since DETECTive avoids backtracking completely, it can predict test patterns up to 15x faster than academic tools and up to 2x faster than commercial tools. DETECTive achieves up to 100% pattern accuracy on synthetic designs and up to 95% test pattern accuracy on realistic designs. To our knowledge, DETECTive is the first to leverage deep learning to predict test patterns for digital hardware designs that can complement the traditional test generation techniques for faster design closure
VeriBug: An Attention-based Framework for Bug Localization in Hardware Designs
In recent years, there has been an exponential growth in the size and complexity of System-on-Chip (SoC) designs targeting different specialized applications. The cost of an undetected bug in these systems is much higher than in traditional processors, as it may imply loss of property or life. Despite decades of research on simulation and formal methods for debugging and verification, the problem is exacerbated by the ever-shrinking
time-to-market and ever-increasing demand to churn out billions of devices. In this work, we propose VeriBug, which leverages recent advances in deep learning (DL) to accelerate debugging at the Register-Transfer level (RTL) and generates explanations of likely root causes. Our experiments show that VeriBug can achieve an average bug localization coverage of 82.5% on open-source designs and a wide variety of injected bugs
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Scalable functional validation of next generation SoCs
System-on-Chips (SoCs) constitutes the primary backbone of modern embedded computing devices including many safety-critical applications e.g., autonomous vehicles, health care systems. The presence of any undetected bugs in these systems would have aberrant cost both in terms of safety and reliability and can cause loss of property or life. Hence, SoC validation is a crucial task to ensure the functional correctness of an SoC. The sheer size, presence of hundreds of concurrently executing heterogeneous IPs, vertical integration of SoC components e.g., hardware/firmware/software to realize multiple functionality, and application-level relevance of components present a new spectrum of validation challenges that have rendered the traditional microprocessor validation paradigm moot in the context of SoC validation. The challenges include observability enhancement and debug and diagnosis under the constraint of vertical integrations, identifying high-quality verification artifacts among others. In industrial practice, SoC validation is a manual, unsystematic, and ad hoc process that heavily relies on the expertise and the creativity of the validator. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop scalable and efficient algorithms of industrial relevance to address this massive ongoing challenge of SoC validation.
This dissertation makes contributions to both post-silicon and pre-silicon validation of SoCs, with highly impactful contributions to next-generation post-silicon SoC validation. We use top-down analysis, a higher level of abstraction, and application relevance as the key ideas to automate post-silicon observability enhancement for industrial scale SoCs and scale observability to design that is more than 300x the size of designs that have been presented in the academic literature so far. Our observability enhancement solution can be applied at the netlist-level, behavioral level, and at the system-wide application level to select high-quality signals that are most beneficial for post-silicon debug and diagnosis. We apply a feature engineering based machine learning technique on the observed signal data to develop an automatic, scalable, and efficient post-silicon debug and diagnosis solution. The key idea is to learn the correct and erroneous design behavior automatically from trace data without prior design knowledge. We believe our debugging solution can automate post-silicon debug and diagnosis, where manual debugging is the norm. The quality of SoC verification and validation heavily depends on the quality of verification artifacts e.g., assertions. To automate and expedite identification of high-functional coverage assertions that are useful for regression analysis, localization, etc., we have also developed a comprehensive ranking scheme for assertions. The key idea is to identify assertions that capture important design behaviors by analyzing the design source code.
Our SoC validation solutions are scalable and efficient. We consistently show orders of magnitude speedup improvements over the state-of-the-art while objectively improving quality of results. We have shown that going forward application-level analysis is the key to scale post-silicon validation to industrial scale SoCs. Our proposed validation solutions can plug into the existing industrial validation process to introduce automation in the current unsystematic, ad hoc, manual settings with multiple order of magnitudes of benefit.Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'U of I Access', the embargo will last until 2021-08-01The student, Debjit Pal, accepted the attached license on 2019-07-11 at 09:37.The student, Debjit Pal, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2019-07-11 at 09:53.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2019-07-11 at 10:56.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #14264 on 2019-11-26 at 13:05:22Made available in DSpace on 2019-11-26T20:49:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3
PAL-DISSERTATION-2019.pdf: 5309374 bytes, checksum: 6d7f137663d9a2636db9d023296e5ecc (MD5)
dissertation_dpal2.zip: 21557789 bytes, checksum: 9dc37eb909b51cd6332e21b584f31aef (MD5)
LICENSE.txt: 4207 bytes, checksum: c490567a148a16658681a0fcb4231c2f (MD5)
Previous issue date: 2019-07-11Embargo set by: Seth Robbins for item 112957
Lift date: 2021-11-26T20:49:41Z
Reason: Author requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD systemU of I Only Restriction Lifted for Item 112957 on 2021-11-27T10:15:23Z
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Scalable functional validation of next generation SoCs
System-on-Chips (SoCs) constitutes the primary backbone of modern embedded computing devices including many safety-critical applications e.g., autonomous vehicles, health care systems. The presence of any undetected bugs in these systems would have aberrant cost both in terms of safety and reliability and can cause loss of property or life. Hence, SoC validation is a crucial task to ensure the functional correctness of an SoC. The sheer size, presence of hundreds of concurrently executing heterogeneous IPs, vertical integration of SoC components e.g., hardware/firmware/software to realize multiple functionality, and application-level relevance of components present a new spectrum of validation challenges that have rendered the traditional microprocessor validation paradigm moot in the context of SoC validation. The challenges include observability enhancement and debug and diagnosis under the constraint of vertical integrations, identifying high-quality verification artifacts among others. In industrial practice, SoC validation is a manual, unsystematic, and ad hoc process that heavily relies on the expertise and the creativity of the validator. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop scalable and efficient algorithms of industrial relevance to address this massive ongoing challenge of SoC validation.
This dissertation makes contributions to both post-silicon and pre-silicon validation of SoCs, with highly impactful contributions to next-generation post-silicon SoC validation. We use top-down analysis, a higher level of abstraction, and application relevance as the key ideas to automate post-silicon observability enhancement for industrial scale SoCs and scale observability to design that is more than 300x the size of designs that have been presented in the academic literature so far. Our observability enhancement solution can be applied at the netlist-level, behavioral level, and at the system-wide application level to select high-quality signals that are most beneficial for post-silicon debug and diagnosis. We apply a feature engineering based machine learning technique on the observed signal data to develop an automatic, scalable, and efficient post-silicon debug and diagnosis solution. The key idea is to learn the correct and erroneous design behavior automatically from trace data without prior design knowledge. We believe our debugging solution can automate post-silicon debug and diagnosis, where manual debugging is the norm. The quality of SoC verification and validation heavily depends on the quality of verification artifacts e.g., assertions. To automate and expedite identification of high-functional coverage assertions that are useful for regression analysis, localization, etc., we have also developed a comprehensive ranking scheme for assertions. The key idea is to identify assertions that capture important design behaviors by analyzing the design source code.
Our SoC validation solutions are scalable and efficient. We consistently show orders of magnitude speedup improvements over the state-of-the-art while objectively improving quality of results. We have shown that going forward application-level analysis is the key to scale post-silicon validation to industrial scale SoCs. Our proposed validation solutions can plug into the existing industrial validation process to introduce automation in the current unsystematic, ad hoc, manual settings with multiple order of magnitudes of benefit.U of I OnlyAuthor requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD syste
- …
