Papers by Alessandro Forghieri
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004
In this paper we report on a case study of correct automatic assembly of software components. We ... more In this paper we report on a case study of correct automatic assembly of software components. We show the application of our tool (called Synthesis) for correct components assembly to a software system in the area of CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work). More specifically we consider a product data management (PDM) cooperative system which has been developed by the company Think3 in Bologna, ITALY (www.think3.com). In the area of CSCW, the automatic enforcing of desired interactions among the components forming the system requires the ability to properly manage the dynamic interactions of the components. Moreover once a customer acquires a CSCW system, the vendor of the CSCW system has to spend many further resources in order to integrate the CSCW system with the client applications used by the customer organization. Thus the full automation of the phase of integration code development has a great influence for a good setting of a CSCW system on the market. We present the application of our approach and we describe our experience in automatic derivation of the code which integrates the components forming the PDM cooperative system above mentioned. The case study we treat in this paper represent the first attempt to, successfully, apply Synthesis in real-scale contexts.
Proceedings. VLSI and Computer Peripherals. COMPEURO 89
Increasing chip density makes the influence of three-dimensional effects in VLSI devices more not... more Increasing chip density makes the influence of three-dimensional effects in VLSI devices more noticeable. The authors present a prototypal three-dimensional device simulator, which allows for accurate modelling of such effects. It adopts a prismatic-element discretization technique that makes the mesh generation easier without introducing excessively severe geometrical limitations. Among the peculiar features of the program is the capability of managing appropriate boundary conditions for floating gates (i.e. charge-boundary conditions). As a test application, the simulation of a floating-gate EPROM cell is compared with a two-dimensional simulation, with good results. Some details about the implementation of the code on a Cray supercomputer are given, and the program performance in a vector environment is discussed
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 1989
An algorithm allowing the automatic generation of a mesh and accounting for the main physical fea... more An algorithm allowing the automatic generation of a mesh and accounting for the main physical features of the problem is presented. The adaptivity is provided by a refinement strategy which preserves the characteristics of the initial grid, inserting new nodes only in the regions where the solution deviates from a linear behavior. A geometrical interpretation in terms of a "monitor surface" is given, and various different approaches to the problem are discussed. The efficiency of the algorithm is enhanced by means of a local solution scheme, which uses previously computed values of all the unknown quantities as boundary conditions for the newly generated nodes. Finally, a few examples illustrate the performance of the algorithm.
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 2005
This paper reports on the fruitful combination of academic experience with formal modelling techn... more This paper reports on the fruitful combination of academic experience with formal modelling techniques and industrial experience with requirements exploration. We study the addition of a publish/subscribe notification service to thinkteam, a a ready-to-use Product Data Management application developed by think3. thinkteam allows enterprises to capture, organise, automate, and share engineering product information and it is an example of an asynchronous and dispersed groupware system. We define an abstract specification (model) of the groupware protocol underlying thinkteam and augment it with a publish/subscribe notification service. Consequently, we show a number of important correctness properties of the thinkteam model, some of which are also relevant to groupware protocols in general. In particular, we show that by adding a publish/subscribe notification service to thinkteam, the user's awareness of the status of the development of the engineering product and the activities of the design team increases. a thinkteam is a registered trademark of think3, Inc. For details: http://www.think3.com.
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 1988
A discretization scheme of the hydrodynamic model for semiconductor devices is proposed, which ge... more A discretization scheme of the hydrodynamic model for semiconductor devices is proposed, which generalizes the Scharfetter-Gummel method to both the momentum-and the energy-conservation equations. The major advantages of the scheme are that i) the discretization is carried out without neglecting any terms, this providing a satisfactory description of such effects as velocity overshoot and carrier heating, and ii) the resulting equations lend themselves to a self-consistent solution procedure similar to those currently used to solve the simpler drift-diffusion equations. Two-dimensional steady-state simulations of an n-channel MOSFET and of an n-p-n BJT have been carried out by means of an improved version of program HFIELDS, developed by some of the authors. Carrier-temperature plots have been obtained with a reasonable computational effort, this demonstrating the efficiency of the technique. The results have been compared with those obtained with the standard drift-diffusion model and significant differences in the electron concentration have been found, especially at the drain end of the MOS-FET channel.
We report on a fruitful combination of applying academic experience with formal modelling and ver... more We report on a fruitful combination of applying academic experience with formal modelling and verification techniques to an industrial case study. The goal of the case study was to investigate a priori, i.e. before implementation, the effects of adding a lightweight and easy-to-use publish/subscribe (event) notification service to thinkteam r ○ —an asynchronous and dispersed groupware system which was developed by think3. Researchers from the Formal Methods and Tools (FM&T) group of ISTI–CNR—with a longstanding experience in research on the development and application of formal methods, notations, and software tools for the specification, design, and verification of complex computer systems— therefore teamed up with think3—a global provider of integrated product development solutions that provides mechanical design and Product Data Management (PDM) software catering the product management needs of design processes in the manufacturing industry. The technical details of this joint re...
Proceedings. VLSI and Computer Peripherals. COMPEURO 89, 1989
Increasing chip density makes the influence of three-dimensional effects in VLSI devices more not... more Increasing chip density makes the influence of three-dimensional effects in VLSI devices more noticeable. The authors present a prototypal three-dimensional device simulator, which allows for accurate modelling of such effects. It adopts a prismatic-element discretization technique that makes the mesh generation easier without introducing excessively severe geometrical limitations. Among the peculiar features of the program is the capability of managing appropriate boundary conditions for floating gates (i.e. charge-boundary conditions). As a test application, the simulation of a floating-gate EPROM cell is compared with a two-dimensional simulation, with good results. Some details about the implementation of the code on a Cray supercomputer are given, and the program performance in a vector environment is discussed
Microelectronics Journal, 1990
Two dimensional (2D) modelling of electron devices is already established as an indispensable too... more Two dimensional (2D) modelling of electron devices is already established as an indispensable tool for VLSI design, and a number of very sophisticated 2D device simulators have been developed. The increasing miniaturization and packing density of VLSI circuits is now boosting research activity towards three-dimensional (3D) device simulation. In this paper we present some results obtained with our prototype 3D simulator, HFIELDS-3D, and discuss some topics related to the underlying philosophy and to the implementation of a vector code, which we are now exploiting on a CRAY X-MP48 machine.
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Papers by Alessandro Forghieri