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Redundant via insertion is highly recommended for improving chip yield and reliability. In this paper, we study the problem of double via insertion with wire bending (DVI/WB) in a post-routing stage, where a single via can have at most one redundant via inserted next to it. Aside from this, we are allowed to bend existing signal wires for enhancing the insertion rate of double vias. The goal of DVI/WB is to primarily insert as many double vias as possible and to minimize the amount of layout perturbation as the secondary objective. We formulate the DVI/WB problem as that of finding a minimum-weight maximum independent set (mWMIS) on an enhanced conflict graph. We propose algorithms to perform wire bending and to construct the enhanced conflict graph from a given design. Moreover, we also propose a zero-one integer linear program (0-1 ILP) based approach to solve mWMIS. Experimental results show that

Embedded cores are being increasingly used in the design of large system-on-a-chip (SoC). Because of the high complexity of SoC, the design verification is a challenge for system integrators. To reduce the verification complexity, the port-order fault (POF) model has been used for verifying core-based designs (Tang and Jou, 1998). In this paper, we present an automatic-verification pattern generation (AVPG) for SoC design verification based on the POF model and perform experiments on combinational and sequential benchmarks. Experimental results show that our AVPG can efficiently generate verification patterns with high POF coverage.

A few misprints occurred in the paper, due to technical typesetting problems. The editorial staff of Acta Mathematica apologizes for the mistake. The online version has been corrected. Corrections to the printed version are provided here.

We propose a new nonmonotone filter method to promote global and fast local convergence for sequential quadratic programming algorithms. Our method uses two filters: a standard, global g-filter for global convergence, and a local nonmonotone l-filter that allows us to establish fast local convergence. We show how to switch between the two filters efficiently, and we prove global and superlinear local convergence. A special feature of the proposed method is that it does not require second-order correction steps. We present preliminary numerical results comparing our implementation with a classical filter SQP method.