SIDAC-I is a digital analog simulator which permits analog as
well as hybrid simulations to be programmed on a digital computer.
FORTRAN, a scientific computer language, may be included as an
integral part of the SIDAC-I simulation language. The simulator
consists of a controller program and a set of predefined...
In this thesis we consider computer techniques for inverting
n X n matrices and linear Fredholm integral operators of the
second kind. We develop techniques which allow us to prove the
existence of and find approximations to inverses for the above
types of operators. In addition, we are able to...
This paper corrects an apparent deficiency in the published
information concerning Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) by
introducing and discussing an approach for selecting an HDL for
use in a design project. Although three classes of HDLs are discussed
in this paper, High-Level Languages (HLLs), General Purpose
Simulation Languages (GPSLs) and...
This paper makes available practical algorithms and their associated
FORTRAN IV computer programs for finding the roots of
polynomial equations.
The purpose of this paper is to examine effective algorithms
for solving polynomial algebraic equations in one unknown on a digital
computer. The advent of high - speed digital computing...
Since the advent of the modern computer there has been great interest in simulation of all types. It is not possible to simulate very large systems on computers. This thesis presents the algorithms necessary to simulate a college with respect to the academic relationship of the student with the college....
An instruction set and programming examples are described for
a Distributed Logic Memory computer organization. The computer is
designed to take advantage of the economies of very large-scale circuit
integration. In addition, the computer can grow in an orderly
way. As it grows there is increased parallelism possible so that...
This thesis documents a new language which facilitates
the construction of Turing machines. The language translator
is written in Compass and has been debugged and is
available for use on the CDC 3300.
Specifications for a simulation language capable of modeling
fuzzy systems are presented. Actions occurring in the running
model are to be displayed on a graphics terminal in the .form of
modified E-nets. The concept of partial execution of predicates
is introduced in connection with the underlying continuously valued
logic. Fuzzy...
A new system called sequential/parallel matrix grammars
for two-dimensional pattern processing is introduced and studied.
Miscellaneous language operations such as union, catenation (row
and column), Kleene's closure (row and column) and substitutions
are investigated. The equivalence of sequential/parallel matrix
languages and finite-turn repetitive checking automata is established.
Hierarchies for both...
The purpose of this research is to design a high level language
(HLL) suitable for microprogramming. A top down design technique has
been adopted which makes the language design process simple and
accurate.
The primitive operations of a high level language for producing
emulators is shown to include special purpose...
In von Neumann Languages, side effects occur if one or more non local variables change value(s) during the execution of a procedure or a function. Side effects can occur only if the programming language provides a notion of memory (or state) where the effect will be stored. Side effects complicate...
Program comprehension is important in program testing, debugging, and maintenance. Programming style impacts program understanding. However, there has not been any systematic identification of individual style factors and their contribution to program comprehension. In this thesis we present a programming style taxonomy composed of three classes: typographic (program layout and...
An interactive man-hybrid computer algorithm is presented
for searching a set of dynamic system parameters which effect a
compromise between performance characteristics and give satisfactory
system sensitivity without any analytical calculations or a
priori indices of performance. The parameter search is conducted
in a real time design situation in which...
The impact of the electronic computer on the teaching
of mathematics, science, and engineering has created
the need for a relatively low cost instructional digital
computer. SPEDTAC (stored Program Educational Digital
Transistorized Automatic Computer) was designed specifically
to fulfill this need.
The prototype described is a serial, solid state,
single...
An attempt to determine the relationship between the computer,
the computer program exchange organization and today's practicing
civil engineer has just been completed. A questionnaire was used to
obtain information and opinions from 850 selected practicing civil
engineers. Based on those questionnaires reaching their addresses,
a return rate of 81.7...
This thesis is concerned with the design of an external
multiplication package which can be utilized as an I/O device
with a PDP-8/L computer. The multiplier and multiplicand are
assumed to be 12 bit integers. The 24 bit product can be
transferred back to the accumulator of computer 12 bits...
With the advancing solid-state technology, it is necessary to
develop new techniques for synthesizing digital networks. The regular
pattern of cellular circuits seems to be the best fitted for the new LSI
technology. Recently, cellular implementations of comibinational circuits
have received considerable attention but very little attention has
been given...
This thesis is concerned with the logic design of a
small digital computer employing Read Only Memory(ROM) in
a special type of arithmetic unit(AU). The AU is controlled
by the ROM and is capable of performing a large number of
operations. The performance of the unit with its associated
ROM...
With the advent of LSI, iterative forms of realization
of digital systems are becoming increasingly popular with
system designers. Many problems occurring in digital computer
design render themselves suitable for iterative
realization. These include adders, arithmetic logic units,
coding and decoding circuits and so on. Fault-free functioning
of such systems...
A decision support system (DSS) incorporating domain
expertise guides, tutors, and consults a decision maker in
opportunity, problem, and crisis identification activities. The
objective for the system is to promote improved decision making.
Using an "Independent Groups" design, an experimental study was
conducted to investigate the effects of DSS use...
OSIRIS is an integrated information architecture which was developed at Oregon State University. SIDUR is the data model upon which the semantic level is based. The semantic level is the mediating level between user's information needs and the stored data. The advantages of providing a semantic database environment include flexibility...
This thesis is an investigation of the characteristics of transistor-coupled logic using both theoretic and experimental methods. The steady state and transient behavior of the transistor are first investigated, especially as applied to the common emitter configuration. A number of references giving further information are cited.
Next, the characteristics of...
In view of recent developments in large-scale, complex digital systems, it is of interest to broaden the study of two-leveled logical systems to the study of three-leveled systems. This paper introduces the ternary logic system and develops a design approach for ternary digital systems that is based on familiar binary...
This thesis discusses a method of fast multiplication by parallel
addition of summands. A logical element that performs this parallel
addition is defined, and examples of the element realized with threshold
logic are shown. Relations between the type of logical element
used, and the speed and cost of the multiplier...
The development of new electronic devices and design procedures
applicable to ternary switching circuits suggests that it might be desirable
to use ternary arithmetic in direct digital control systems.
The advantages of decimal, binary, and ternary arithmetic in digital
computers are discussed and a set of rules for signed -digit...
There are a number of well known techniques for extracting parallelism from a given program. They range from hardware implementations, building restructuring compilers or reorganizing of programs so as to specify all the available parallelism. The success rate of any of the known techniques is rather poor over all types...
Digital filtering can be done on a limited scale using an
IBM 1620 digital computer. A computer program has been written
to aid in the design of digital filters by computing the power spectrum
of sampled time data. The power spectrum analysis program
was coded in SPS symbolic machine language....
Spreadsheet language programs, which include commercial spreadsheets, are among the most common form of software in use today. Unlike more "traditional" forms of software however, spreadsheet language programs are created and maintained by end-users with little or no programming experience. As a result, a high percentage of these programs contain...
The problem studied was to determine if there were any significant
differences (5% level) between control and experimental groups
of students using rapid batch processing and time-sharing computer
facilities in the study of elementary Fortran programming.
Students were randomly assigned to the control (batch processing)
and experimental (time-sharing) groups with...
Partial programming is a field of study where users specify an outline or skeleton of a program, but leave various parts undefined. The undefined parts are then completed by an external mechanism to form a complete program. Adaptation-Based Programming (ABP) is a method of partial programming that utilizes techniques from...
The practice of literate programming is not widespread because existing literate programming systems have some undesirable characteristics such as programming language and text processor dependence and lack of flexible tools for viewing and manipulation of the source file. This dissertation describes the literate programming system AOPS (Abstraction Oriented Programming System)...
Although spreadsheets can be argued to be the most widely-used end-user programming languages today, they are very limited compared to other programming languages, supporting only a few built-in types and offering only primitive support for code reuse. The inheritance mechanisms of object-oriented programming might seem to offer help for the...
Although spreadsheets can be argued to be the most widely-used visual programming languages (VPLs) today, most are very limited compared to other VPLs, supporting only p few built-in types and offering only primitive support for code reuse. The inheritance mechanisms of object-oriented programming might seem to offer help for the...
Prettyprinters are software tools that format program source code so that it conforms to certain standards of consistency and hence improves readability. Traditionally, these standards were fixed for a particular prettyprinter as indicated by a literature survey, with very little or no supporting evidence that the formatting style improves readability....
Test case generation in software testing is a process of developing a set of test data that satisfies a particular test adequacy criterion. It is desirable to automate this process since doing it manually is not only technically difficult but also tedious and time-consuming. Although there has been considerable research...
This thesis describes the adder to be used with the Galaxy computer, which is to be constructed at Oregon State University.
The need for faster, more reliable adders is discussed
along with previous adder designs related to the
Galaxy Fast Carry Adder.
Both the logical design and circuit design of...
The application of residue notation is another
approach for solving the problem of carry propagation in
arithmetic units. Most other methods for solving this
problem are based on changes in adder design and the use
of improved components.
Residue arithmetic has the inherent property of
requiring no carries between moduli....
A high speed adaptive signal processing concept and several high
speed adaptive logic circuit elements are presented.
The adaptive signal processing system operates in a "goal" oriented
mode; the system tries to optimize its characteristics to
achieve a given goal in spite of unforeseen variations in the inputs,
the system,...
The concept of combining arithmetic and memory capability on
a single semiconductor chip has become practical from a system's
viewpoint through the decreased cost of semiconductor memories and
high circuit densities achieved through large scale integration. This
paper describes a model for studying the feasibility of such systems.
An arithmetic-memory...
It is established folklore in numerical analysis, for solution
of a square system of linear equations by Gauss elimination, that the
standard method of choice of pivot elements is to search the entire
suppressed matrix for the element largest in absolute value. However,
it was felt by the author, that...
A systematic and rigorous derivation of the Boolean functions that represent the three operations of the ring of integers in the 1-2-4-5 code is developed from their corresponding tables. The same is done for numerical complementation of a number. The equations of the latter are combined with those for addition...
Research in digital computers takes two paths: one uses the
computer as a tool to reach certain objectives; on the other, the computer
itself is the object of research. The NEBULA computer was
built with the latter in mind. The system design and logical design
are described here in detail....
Parallel programming is the major stumbling block preventing the parallel processing industry from quickly satisfying the demand for parallel computer software. This research is aimed at solving some of the problems of software development for parallel computers. ELGDF is a graphical language for designing parallel programs. The goal of ELGDF...
Until now, attempts to extend the one-way constraint evaluation model of the spreadsheet paradigm to support complex objects, such as colored circles or user-defined types, have led to approaches featuring either a direct way of creating objects graphically or strong compatibility with the spreadsheet paradigm, but not both. This inability...
This research develops an object-oriented approach of modeling microprocessor architecture. A generic modeling library, bBlocks, is proposed as a framework for constructing microprocessor simulation. bBlocks is a collection of predefined abstract components (blocks) implemented in Java, the object-oriented programming language. Blocks are defined and used as the basic components in...
Functional programming is concerned with referential transparency, that is, given a certain function and its parameter, that the result will always be the same. However, it seems that this is violated in applications involving uncertainty, such as rolling a dice. This thesis defines the background of probabilistic programming and domain-specific...
One of the commonly used simulation approaches is process orientation. This is based on the use of nodes (or blocks) that perform functions in series. In spite of the compactness and ease of learning that characterize process-based simulation, many languages are somewhat complex, primarily the result of the large number...
This simulation is a model for a tidal power-peaking plant that
can be used to determine the electrical peaking generation for a given
set of conditions.
The simulation internally contains a tide producing function
for a specific year, the hydraulic characteristics of the plant, and the
plant's machines' characteristics. The...
The repetitious nature of air conditioning calculation leads to
arithmetic errors and a high cost of designing air conditioning systems.
Short cut calculations are employed to limit the calculation
and the chance of making errors.
Computers with their high speed of calculation and the ability
to make limited "logic's decisions...
The effects of possible operating variables such as flow rate, surface temperature, bulk temperature, solids contents, sulfate addition and pH on the fouling of sulfite spent evaporators were studied. The study pointed out that the Ca⁺⁺ concentration difference between heated surface and bulk is the most important factor for fouling...
Balanced codes, in which each codeword contains equally many 1's and 0's, are useful in such applications as in optical transmission and optical recording. When balanced codes are used, the same number of 1's and 0's pass through the channel after the transmission of every word, so the channel is...
This paper reports on an empirical study involving end users that addresses the question of whether it is possible to provide the benefits of formal testing within the informal spreadsheet paradigm. We have developed a "What You See Is What You Test" (WYSIWYT) methodology that brings the benefits of formal...
Researchers in the Forms/3 group have previously developed the WYSIWYT methodology, exploring a way of systematically testing spreadsheet languages. The previous work presented the WYSIWYT methodology for individual spreadsheet cells, and later partially extended it to large grids in which some cells share the same formula. The Forms/3 spreadsheet language...
An interdisciplinary study into the theory of design decisions has yielded a model for tracking design changes in hardware/software systems, but it still needs to be applied to a larger system to test its efficiency at tracking important data. This thesis creates an implementation of PLEXIL, a language in development...
How can rigorous forms of testing be supported in a way that is both compatible with the visual aspect of visual programming languages, and usable by the audiences using those languages - even when the audience has no background in software engineering? Visual programs are likely to contain at least...
Spreadsheet languages are the most commonly used end-user programming paradigm, yet spreadsheets commonly contain errors. Research shows that a significant number of spreadsheets (20%-40%) created by end users contain errors. In an attempt to reduce this error rate, this work presents an assertion propagation system for an end-user spreadsheet programming...
Delta-Sigma Modulator-based Analog-to-Digital converter design is an active area of research. New topologies require extensive simulations to verify their performance. A series of improvements were made to an existing circuit simulation package in order to speed the simulation process for the designer. Various examples of these improvements are presented in...
The design of programming tools is slow and costly. To ease this process, we have developed a design pattern catalog aimed at providing guidance about how to design tools for developers. This guidance is grounded in Information Foraging Theory (IFT), which empirical studies have shown to be useful for understanding...
Oregon State University Libraries and Press (OSULP) has a long history of digitizing, creating, and curating digital objects. These objects include digital representations of unique items from the Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC) such as the photographs, maps, manuscripts, audio, and video housed in Oregon Digital. The ScholarsArchive@OSU...
Multi-level decision feedback equalization (MDFE) is an effective sampled signal processing technique to remove inter-symbol interference (ISI) from disk read-back signals. Parallelism which doubles the symbol rate can be realized by utilizing the characteristic of channel response and decision feedback equalization algorithm.
A mixed-signal IC implementation has been chosen for...
We introduce a visual specification language for spreadsheets that allows the definition of spreadsheet templates. These templates are used by a spreadsheet generator to create Excel spreadsheets that are probably free from a large class of errors, such as reference, omission, and type errors. We demonstrate how spreadsheets can be...
Scaling the supply voltage into the sub/near-threshold domain is one of the most effective methods for improving the energy efficiency of next-generation electronic microsystems. Unfortunately, the relationship between low-voltage operation and radiation-induced soft error rate is not widely known, as little research has been previously performed and reported for soft-error...