Formal Verification of VLIW Microprocessors with Speculative Execution

. This is a study of the formal verification of a VLIW microprocessor that imitates the Intel Itanium [9][12][17] in features such as predicated execution, register remapping, advanced and speculative loads, and branch prediction. The formal verification is done with the Burch and Dill flushing technique [5] by exploiting the properties of Positive Equality [3][4]. The contributions include an extensive use of conservative approximations in abstracting portions of the processor and a framework for decomposition of the Boolean evaluation of the correctness formula. The conservative approximations are applied automatically when abstracting a memory whose forwarding logic is not affected by stalling conditions that preserve the correctness of the memory semantics for the same memory. These techniques allow a reduction of more than a factor of 4 in the CPU time for the formal verification of the most complex processor model examined relative to the monolithic evaluation of the ..

Understanding interaction between office-based professionals for the development of advanced communication and information technologies

This paper describes a multi-method exploratory study conducted with the aim of developing a greater understanding of how individuals working in an office environment communicate and manage information. The study is directed towards informing the design of 'personal information management appliances' - advanced information and communication products which support the management of electronic communication and information. The study has focused on the relationship between managers and their personal assistants as an instance of collaborating office-based professionals, identifying and categorising the range of tasks which are performed during office-based interaction. It describes the frequency and duration of a common set of tasks, indicating variations in performance of those tasks by managers and assistants, and proposes the implications which this may have on the design of enabling technologies to support such collaborative office-based activities