Posted: 5th January 2012

The Department's Daniel Kroening and Tom Melham are to give public seminar on ‘Über Chips and Super Software’.  The event, part of the 'Oxford at Said' seminar series, will take place on 6 February at the Said Business School in Oxford.

Integrated electronic chips, such as the processor in a laptop, contain many billions of interconnected transistors, all working together to run programs. The engineering design of a new chip is extremely challenging, and ensuring that the finished chip works correctly is vitally important. Computer simulations are widely used to validate designs but to test a chip exhaustively would take millions of years.

Tom Melham, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, has been working with Intel Corporation since the late 1990s to develop and apply a mathematical validation technique for electronic chips known as formal verification. This entails building a mathematical description of the chip design and then analysing its correctness by rigorous mathematical proof. Twenty-five years ago these advanced formal verification techniques were thought unachievable; today they are in routine use by Intel and other companies worldwide.

Daniel Kroening, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, will address the issue of quality assurance for software, which is typically manual, requires expertise, and frequently dominates the cost of software development. He will give an overview of pathways to automation in software quality assurance.

The Oxford at Said Seminars bring together leading academics from the University of Oxford to present the latest research in their field to a non-specialist audience. The series is a joint venture between the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the University's Research Services department. Each seminar features two or three speakers and a Q&A session, followed by a drinks reception.

The seminar will be held on 6 February 2012, 18:30pm at the Rhodes Trust Lecture Theatre, Said Business School, Oxford.   The event is open to the public and free to attend. 

Further information and bookings: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/centres/entrepreneurship/events/Pages/OxfordatSaid%C3%9CberChipsandSuperSoftware.aspx  or contact  emily.davis@sbs.ox.ac.uk