E-QED: Electrical Bug Localization During Post-Silicon Validation Enabled by Quick Error Detection and Formal Methods

During post-silicon validation, manufactured integrated circuits are extensively tested in actual system environments to detect design bugs. Bug localization involves identification of a bug trace (a sequence of inputs that activates and detects the bug) and a hardware design block where the bug is located. Existing bug localization practices during post-silicon validation are mostly manual and ad hoc, and, hence, extremely expensive and time consuming. This is particularly true for subtle electrical bugs caused by unexpected interactions between a design and its electrical state. We present E-QED, a new approach that automatically localizes electrical bugs during post-silicon validation. Our results on the OpenSPARC T2, an open-source 500-million-transistor multicore chip design, demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of E-QED: starting with a failed post-silicon test, in a few hours (9 hours on average) we can automatically narrow the location of the bug to (the fan-in logic cone of) a handful of candidate flip-flops (18 flip-flops on average for a design with ~ 1 Million flip-flops) and also obtain the corresponding bug trace. The area impact of E-QED is ~2.5%. In contrast, deter-mining this same information might take weeks (or even months) of mostly manual work using traditional approaches

Vegan diets : practical advice for athletes and exercisers.

With the growth of social media as a platform to share information, veganism is becoming more visible, and could be becoming more accepted in sports and in the health and fitness industry. However, to date, there appears to be a lack of literature that discusses how to manage vegan diets for athletic purposes. This article attempted to review literature in order to provide recommendations for how to construct a vegan diet for athletes and exercisers. While little data could be found in the sports nutrition literature specifically, it was revealed elsewhere that veganism creates challenges that need to be accounted for when designing a nutritious diet. This included the sufficiency of energy and protein; the adequacy of vitamin B12, iron, zinc, calcium, iodine and vitamin D; and the lack of the long-chain n-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA in most plant-based sources. However, via the strategic management of food and appropriate supplementation, it is the contention of this article that a nutritive vegan diet can be designed to achieve the dietary needs of most athletes satisfactorily. Further, it was suggested here that creatine and β-alanine supplementation might be of particular use to vegan athletes, owing to vegetarian diets promoting lower muscle creatine and lower muscle carnosine levels in consumers. Empirical research is needed to examine the effects of vegan diets in athletic populations however, especially if this movement grows in popularity, to ensure that the health and performance of athletic vegans is optimised in accordance with developments in sports nutrition knowledge