Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of strategic orientations (technology, alliance, and market orientations) of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in an emerging market, namely Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing upon data from 200 Dubai SMEs, this study uses a structured survey that was developed from a methodical literature review. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to evaluate the findings. Findings – The findings revealed that market orientation has a positive effect on business performance compared to technology and alliance orientations within SMEs in the Dubai marketplace. Research limitations/implications – This study offers SMEs a better understanding of their strategic orientations to enhance business performance. However, this study is limited to only SMEs operating in the Dubai marketplace. Future research could also look at other markets and use qualitative research methods. Originality/value – This study provides important insights that could guide SMEs in their understanding of strategic orientations and the benefits for business performance. These findings reinforce the growing empirical evidence of the positive effect of market orientation, as being a strategic direction for SMEs, on business performance.

In this paper, the effects of simultaneous write access on the fault modeling of multiport RAMs are investigated. New fault models representing more accurately the actual faults in such memories are then defined. Subsequently, a general algorithm that ensures the detection of all faults belonging to the new fault model is proposed. Unfortunately, the obtained algorithms are of O(n/sup 2/) complexity which is not practical for real purposes. In order to reduce the complexity of the former test algorithm a topological approach has been developed. Finally, a BIST implementation of one of the proposed topological algorithms is presented

ISBN: 0818670002An important drawback of implementing self-checking circuits concerns the lack of dedicated CAD tools. This problem results on a significant increasing of the design effort and compromises the interest of such designs. CAD tools aimed to implement self-checking data paths is of high interest since data-paths are basic parts of microprocessors and microcontrollers. The tools presented here include generators of self-checking adders, ALUs, multipliers, dividers, shifters and register files, as well as generators of parity and double rail checkers. Another tool interconnects these blocks to generate the self-checking data-path

International audienceSelf-checking designs will gain increasing interest in industrial applications if they satisfy the following requirements: high fault coverage, reduced hardware cost and reduced design effort. This work is aimed to reach these requirements for the design of self-checking shifters and is part of a broader project concerning the design of self-checking data paths

ISBN: 0818654104In this paper we present efficient self checking implementations for multiply and divide arrays. These implementations are strongly fault secure or totally self-checking for a comprehensive fault model which includes stuck-at, stuck-on and stuck-open faults. They are compatible with data paths checked by the parity code (i.e. no code translators are needed), so that the self checking implementation of the whole data path is simplified