What grid cells convey about rat location

We characterize the relationship between the simultaneously recorded quantities of rodent grid cell firing and the position of the rat. The formalization reveals various properties of grid cell activity when considered as a neural code for representing and updating estimates of the rat's location. We show that, although the spatially periodic response of grid cells appears wasteful, the code is fully combinatorial in capacity. The resulting range for unambiguous position representation is vastly greater than the ≈1–10 m periods of individual lattices, allowing for unique high-resolution position specification over the behavioral foraging ranges of rats, with excess capacity that could be used for error correction. Next, we show that the merits of the grid cell code for position representation extend well beyond capacity and include arithmetic properties that facilitate position updating. We conclude by considering the numerous implications, for downstream readouts and experimental tests, of the properties of the grid cell code

Performance Enhancement of MIMO-OFDM using Redundant Residue Number System

Telecommunication industry requires high capacity networks with high data rates which are achieved through utilization of Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) communication along with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system. Still, the communication channel suffers from noise, interference or distortion due to hardware design limitations, and channel environment, and to combat these challenges, and achieve enhanced performance; various error control techniques are implemented to enable the receiver to detect any possible received errors and correct it and thus; for a certain transmitted signal power the system would have lower Bit Error Rate (BER). The provided research focuses on Redundant Residue Number System (RRNS) coding as a Forward Error Correction (FEC) scheme that improves the performance of MIMO-OFDM based wireless communications in comparison with current methods as Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) coders at the transmitter side or equalizers at receiver side. The Bit Error Rate (BER) performance over the system was measured using MATLAB tool for different simulated channel conditions, including the effect of signal amplitude reduction and multipath delay spreading. Simulation results had shown that RRNS coding scheme provides an enhancement in system performance over conventional error detection and correction coding schemes by utilizing the distinct features of Residue Number System (RNS)

Fuse: A technique to anticipate failures due to degradation in ALUs

This paper proposes the fuse, a technique to anticipate failures due to degradation in any ALU (arithmetic logic unit), and particularly in an adder. The fuse consists of a replica of the weakest transistor in the adder and the circuitry required to measure its degradation. By mimicking the behavior of the replicated transistor the fuse anticipates the failure short before the first failure in the adder appears, and hence, data corruption and program crashes can be avoided. Our results show that the fuse anticipates the failure in more than 99.9% of the cases after 96.6% of the lifetime, even for pessimistic random within-die variations.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Image multiplexing using residue number system coding over MIMO-OFDM communication system

Image transmission over Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) communication system is prone to distortion and noise due to the encountered High-Peak-to-Average-Power-Ratio (PAPR) generated from the OFDM block. This paper studies the utilization of Residue Number System (RNS) as a coding scheme for digital image transmission over Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) – OFDM transceiver communication system. The use of the independent parallel feature of RNS, as well as the reduced signal amplitude to convert the input signal to parallel smaller residue signals, enable to reduce the signal PAPR, decreasing the signal distortion and the Bit Error Rate (BER). Consequently, improving the received Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and enhancing the received image quality. The performance analyzed though BER, and PAPR. Moreover, image quality measurement is achieved through evaluating the Mean Squared Error (MSE), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), and the correlation values between the initial and retrieved images. Simulation results had shown the performance of transmission/reception model with and without RNS coding implementation.

DFT and BIST of a multichip module for high-energy physics experiments

Engineers at Politecnico di Torino designed a multichip module for high-energy physics experiments conducted on the Large Hadron Collider. An array of these MCMs handles multichannel data acquisition and signal processing. Testing the MCM from board to die level required a combination of DFT strategie