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The increasing complexity of modern SoC designs makes tasks of SoC formal verification
a lot more complex and challenging. This motivates the research community to develop
more robust approaches that enable efficient formal verification for such designs.
It is a common scenario to apply a correctness by integration strategy while a SoC
design is being verified. This strategy assumes formal verification to be implemented in
two major steps. First of all, each module of a SoC is considered and verified separately
from the other blocks of the system. At the second step – when the functional correctness
is successfully proved for every individual module – the communicational behavior has
to be verified between all the modules of the SoC. In industrial applications, SAT/SMT-based interval property checking(IPC) has become widely adopted for SoC verification. Using IPC approaches, a verification engineer is able to afford solving a wide range of important verification problems and proving functional correctness of diverse complex components in a modern SoC design. However, there exist critical parts of a design where formal methods often lack their robustness. State-of-the-art property checkers fail in proving correctness for a data path of an industrial central processing unit (CPU). In particular, arithmetic circuits of a realistic size (32 bits or 64 bits) – especially implementing multiplication algorithms – are well-known examples when SAT/SMT-based
formal verification may reach its capacity very fast. In cases like this, formal verification
is replaced with simulation-based approaches in practice. Simulation is a good methodology that may assure a high rate of discovered bugs hidden in a SoC design. However, in contrast to formal methods, a simulation-based technique cannot guarantee the absence of errors in a design. Thus, simulation may still miss some so-called corner-case bugs in the design. This may potentially lead to additional and very expensive costs in terms of time, effort, and investments spent for redesigns, refabrications, and reshipments of new chips.
The work of this thesis concentrates on studying and developing robust algorithms
for solving hard arithmetic decision problems. Such decision problems often originate from a task of RTL property checking for data-path designs. Proving properties of those
designs can efficiently be performed by solving SMT decision problems formulated with
the quantifier-free logic over fixed-sized bit vectors (QF-BV).
This thesis, firstly, proposes an effective algebraic approach based on a Gröbner basis theory that allows to efficiently decide arithmetic problems. Secondly, for the case of custom-designed components, this thesis describes a sophisticated modeling technique which is required to restore all the necessary arithmetic description from these components. Further, this thesis, also, explains how methods from computer algebra and the modeling techniques can be integrated into a common SMT solver. Finally, a new QF-BV SMT solver is introduced.
The purpose of Exploration in Oil Industry is to "discover" an oil-containing geological formation from exploration data. In the context of this PhD project this oil-containing geological formation plays the role of a geometrical object, which may have any shape. The exploration data may be viewed as a "cloud of points", that is a finite set of points, related to the geological formation surveyed in the exploration experiment. Extensions of topological methodologies, such as homology, to point clouds are helpful in studying them qualitatively and capable of resolving the underlying structure of a data set. Estimation of topological invariants of the data space is a good basis for asserting the global features of the simplicial model of the data. For instance the basic statistical idea, clustering, are correspond to dimension of the zero homology group of the data. A statistics of Betti numbers can provide us with another connectivity information. In this work represented a method for topological feature analysis of exploration data on the base of so called persistent homology. Loosely, this is the homology of a growing space that captures the lifetimes of topological attributes in a multiset of intervals called a barcode. Constructions from algebraic topology empowers to transform the data, to distillate it into some persistent features, and to understand then how it is organized on a large scale or at least to obtain a low-dimensional information which can point to areas of interest. The algorithm for computing of the persistent Betti numbers via barcode is realized in the computer algebra system "Singular" in the scope of the work.
This thesis contains the mathematical treatment of a special class of analog microelectronic circuits called translinear circuits. The goal is to provide foundations of a new coherent synthesis approach for this class of circuits. The mathematical methods of the suggested synthesis approach come from graph theory, combinatorics, and from algebraic geometry, in particular symbolic methods from computer algebra. Translinear circuits form a very special class of analog circuits, because they rely on nonlinear device models, but still allow a very structured approach to network analysis and synthesis. Thus, translinear circuits play the role of a bridge between the "unknown space" of nonlinear circuit theory and the very well exploited domain of linear circuit theory. The nonlinear equations describing the behavior of translinear circuits possess a strong algebraic structure that is nonetheless flexible enough for a wide range of nonlinear functionality. Furthermore, translinear circuits offer several technical advantages like high functional density, low supply voltage and insensitivity to temperature. This unique profile is the reason that several authors consider translinear networks as the key to systematic synthesis methods for nonlinear circuits. The thesis proposes the usage of a computer-generated catalog of translinear network topologies as a synthesis tool. The idea to compile such a catalog has grown from the observation that on the one hand, the topology of a translinear network must satisfy strong constraints which severely limit the number of "admissible" topologies, in particular for networks with few transistors, and on the other hand, the topology of a translinear network already fixes its essential behavior, at least for static networks, because the so-called translinear principle requires the continuous parameters of all transistors to be the same. Even though the admissible topologies are heavily restricted, it is a highly nontrivial task to compile such a catalog. Combinatorial techniques have been adapted to undertake this task. In a catalog of translinear network topologies, prototype network equations can be stored along with each topology. When a circuit with a specified behavior is to be designed, one can search the catalog for a network whose equations can be matched with the desired behavior. In this context, two algebraic problems arise: To set up a meaningful equation for a network in the catalog, an elimination of variables must be performed, and to test whether a prototype equation from the catalog and a specified equation of desired behavior can be "matched", a complex system of polynomial equations must be solved, where the solutions are restricted to a finite set of integers. Sophisticated algorithms from computer algebra are applied in both cases to perform the symbolic computations. All mentioned algorithms have been implemented using C++, Singular, and Mathematica, and are successfully applied to actual design problems of humidity sensor circuitry at Analog Microelectronics GmbH, Mainz. As result of the research conducted, an exhaustive catalog of all static formal translinear networks with at most eight transistors is available. The application for the humidity sensor system proves the applicability of the developed synthesis approach. The details and implementations of the algorithms are worked out only for static networks, but can easily be adopted for dynamic networks as well. While the implementation of the combinatorial algorithms is stand-alone software written "from scratch" in C++, the implementation of the algebraic algorithms, namely the symbolic treatment of the network equations and the match finding, heavily rely on the sophisticated Gröbner basis engine of Singular and thus on more than a decade of experience contained in a special-purpose computer algebra system. It should be pointed out that the thesis contains the new observation that the translinear loop equations of a translinear network are precisely represented by the toric ideal of the network's translinear digraph. Altogether, this thesis confirms and strengthenes the key role of translinear circuits as systematically designable nonlinear circuits.
Non-commutative polynomial algebras appear in a wide range of applications, from quantum groups and theoretical physics to linear differential and difference equations. In the thesis, we have developed a framework, unifying many important algebras in the classes of \(G\)- and \(GR\)-algebras and studied their ring-theoretic properties. Let \(A\) be a \(G\)-algebra in \(n\) variables. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for \(A\) to have a Poincar'e-Birkhoff-Witt (PBW) basis. Further on, we show that besides the existence of a PBW basis, \(A\) shares some other properties with the commutative polynomial ring \(\mathbb{K}[x_1,\ldots,x_n]\). In particular, \(A\) is a Noetherian integral domain of Gel'fand-Kirillov dimension \(n\). Both Krull and global homological dimension of \(A\) are bounded by \(n\); we provide examples of \(G\)-algebras where these inequalities are strict. Finally, we prove that \(A\) is Auslander-regular and a Cohen-Macaulay algebra. In order to perform symbolic computations with modules over \(GR\)-algebras, we generalize Gröbner bases theory, develop and respectively enhance new and existing algorithms. We unite the most fundamental algorithms in a suite of applications, called "Gröbner basics" in the literature. Furthermore, we discuss algorithms appearing in the non-commutative case only, among others two-sided Gröbner bases for bimodules, annihilators of left modules and operations with opposite algebras. An important role in Representation Theory is played by various subalgebras, like the center and the Gel'fand-Zetlin subalgebra. We discuss their properties and their relations to Gröbner bases, and briefly comment some aspects of their computation. We proceed with these subalgebras in the chapter devoted to the algorithmic study of morphisms between \(GR\)-algebras. We provide new results and algorithms for computing the preimage of a left ideal under a morphism of \(GR\)-algebras and show both merits and limitations of several methods that we propose. We use this technique for the computation of the kernel of a morphism, decomposition of a module into central characters and algebraic dependence of pairwise commuting elements. We give an algorithm for computing the set of one-dimensional representations of a \(G\)-algebra \(A\), and prove, moreover, that if the set of finite dimensional representations of \(A\) over a ground field \(K\) is not empty, then the homological dimension of \(A\) equals \(n\). All the algorithms are implemented in a kernel extension Plural of the computer algebra system Singular. We discuss the efficiency of computations and provide a comparison with other computer algebra systems. We propose a collection of benchmarks for testing the performance of algorithms; the comparison of timings shows that our implementation outperforms all of the modern systems with the combination of both broad functionality and fast implementation. In the thesis, there are many new non-trivial examples, and also the solutions to various problems, arising in different fields of mathematics. All of them were obtained with the developed theory and the implementation in Plural, most of them are treated computationally in this thesis for the first time.