FPGA BASED DESIGN FOR ACCELERATED FAULT-TESTING OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

In the past few decades, integrated circuits have become a major part of everyday life. Every circuit that is created needs to be tested for faults so faulty circuits are not sent to end-users. The creation of these tests is time consuming, costly and difficult to perform on larger circuits. This research presents a novel method for fault detection and test pattern reduction in integrated circuitry under test. By leveraging the FPGA's reconfigurability and parallel processing capabilities, a speed up in fault detection can be achieved over previous computer simulation techniques. This work presents the following contributions to the field of Stuck-At-Fault detection: We present a new method for inserting faults into a circuit net list. Given any circuit netlist, our tool can insert multiplexers into a circuit at correct internal nodes to aid in fault emulation on reconfigurable hardware. We present a parallel method of fault emulation. The benefit of the FPGA is not only its ability to implement any circuit, but its ability to process data in parallel. This research utilizes this to create a more efficient emulation method that implements numerous copies of the same circuit in the FPGA. A new method to organize the most efficient faults. Most methods for determinin the minimum number of inputs to cover the most faults require sophisticated softwareprograms that use heuristics. By utilizing hardware, this research is able to process data faster and use a simpler method for an efficient way of minimizing inputs.

Measurement of Advance Directive and Medical Treatment Decision-Making Capacity of Older Adults

The objective of this study was to characterize two components of decisional competence that are relevant to advance directive (AD) completion and medical treatment decision making among a subsample of older adults hospitalized in acute care settings.

Accuracy of Recognition and Diagnosis of Comorbid Depression in the Nursing Home

A variety of research has documented high levels of depression among older adults in the health care setting. Additional research has shown that care providers in health care settings are not very effective at diagnosing comorbid depression.This is a troublesome finding since comorbid depression has been linked to a number of negative outcomes in older adults. Early results have indicated that comorbid depression may be associated with a number of unfavorable consequences ranging from impairments in physical functioning to increased mortality.The health care setting with arguably the highest rate of physical impairment is the nursing home and it is the nursing home where the effects of comorbid depression may be most costly. Therefore, the current analysis uses data from the Institutional Population Component of the NationalMedical Expenditure Survey (US Department of Health and Human Services, 1990) to explore rates of both recognized and unrecognized comorbid depression in the nursing home setting. Using a constructed proxy variable representative of the DSM-III-R diagnosis of depression, results indicate that approximately 8.1% of nursing home residents have an unrecognized potential comorbid depression.