Software-based Verification Research Articles

Changes in Patterns of Intensity-modulated Radiotherapy Verification and Quality Assurance in the UK

AimsBetween 2012 and 2014 the number of patients treated in the UK with intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) techniques increased significantly. One reason for this was the radiotherapy innovation fund for the centres in England. Before the announcement of the fund, a survey of radiotherapy centres was carried out in 2012 which collected data on IMRT uptake, obstacles to implementation, equipment used, delivery techniques and verification methods. A repeat survey was carried out in 2014 to identify key changes to IMRT quality assurance and verification practices. Materials and methodsAn online questionnaire was sent out to all 65 UK radiotherapy centres in the summer of 2012 and again in the summer of 2014. Questions covered background and equipment, machine tolerance and quality assurance, machine-based verification, software-based verification and future plans. ResultsThere have been significant changes in the delivery techniques used for IMRT, with more than twice as many centres reporting the use of volumetric-modulated arc therapy techniques in 2014 compared with 2012. This has been combined with an increase in Monte Carlo-based algorithms in treatment planning systems. In 2012 all centres reported the need to carry out machine-based measurements for IMRT plan verification, dropping to 93% in 2014. Nineteen per cent of centres now report making only one measurement per month for prostate plans and 8% of breast plans never have physical measurements. Most centres use detector arrays for quality assurance measurement (86% in 2012 and 91% in 2014), but a significant number still use film and/or ionisation chambers (51% and 41%). In the analysis of these measurements there has been an increase in the use of tighter criteria. There has been a significant increase in the use of software for verification from 63% in 2012 to 95% in 2014. All centres reported that they needed further resources in order to efficiently achieve the quality assurance required for the number of patients planned to be treated in their centre. ConclusionsThe increased numbers of patients being treated with IMRT has meant that there have been significant changes in the way that quality assurance is carried out. These have been mainly in the reduction of measurements and the increase in software-based verification. However, quality assurance is still a significant burden and still has an effect on the numbers of patients who can be treated with IMRT.

Challenges and Novel Solutions for SoC Verification

Hundred million gates SoC designs are all over the place with the trend of doubling the scale in up-coming years. Meanwhile time-to-market makes the situation even more difficult. More and more effort has been allocated onto SoC verification in order to tackle the challenges, including the improvement of software-based verification performance, formal verification, hardware acceleration as well as unified verification. But innovation is still needed, as the existing solution won’t be able to handle efficiently of the increasing design size. This paper will first try to address all major issues which would challenge the SoC verification execution as well as quality. At the second part of this paper, we will discuss how Cadence addresses these challenges including, but not limited to, early software development, metric driven verification, formal verification application, Hardware/Software integrated validation and low power. Through close partnership with major industry leaders, Cadence’s solution has been proven to provide a substantial turn-around time reduction while maintaining high quality of result for various SoC projects.

Using Transfer-Resource Graph for Software-Based Verification of System-on-Chip

The verification of system-on-chip is challenging due to its high level of integration. Multiple components in a system can behave concurrently and compete for resources. Hence, for simulation-based verification, we need a methodology that allows one to automatically generate test cases for testing concurrent and resource-competing behaviors. We introduce the use of a transfer-resource graph (TRG) as the model for test generation. From a high abstraction level, TRG is able to model the parallelism between heterogeneous interaction forms in a system. We show how TRG is used in generating test cases of resource competitions and how these test cases are structured in event-driven test programs. For coverage, TRG can be converted to a Petri net, allowing one to measure the completeness of concurrency in simulation.