Combined surface acoustic wave and surface plasmon resonance measurement of collagen and fibrinogen layers

We use an instrument combining optical (surface plasmon resonance) and acoustic (Love mode acoustic wave device) real-time measurements on a same surface for the identification of water content in collagen and fibrinogen protein layers. After calibration of the surface acoustic wave device sensitivity by copper electrodeposition, the bound mass and its physical properties -- density and optical index -- are extracted from the complementary measurement techniques and lead to thickness and water ratio values compatible with the observed signal shifts. Such results are especially usefully for protein layers with a high water content as shown here for collagen on an hydrophobic surface. We obtain the following results: collagen layers include 70+/-20 % water and are 16+/-3 to 19+/-3 nm thick for bulk concentrations ranging from 30 to 300 ug/ml. Fibrinogen layers include 50+/-10 % water for layer thicknesses in the 6+/-1.5 to 13+/-2 nm range when the bulk concentration is in the 46 to 460 ug/ml range.Comment: 50 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Sampling-based Buffer Insertion for Post-Silicon Yield Improvement under Process Variability

At submicron manufacturing technology nodes process variations affect circuit performance significantly. This trend leads to a large timing margin and thus overdesign to maintain yield. To combat this pessimism, post-silicon clock tuning buffers can be inserted into circuits to balance timing budgets of critical paths with their neighbors. After manufacturing, these clock buffers can be configured for each chip individually so that chips with timing failures may be rescued to improve yield. In this paper, we propose a sampling-based method to determine the proper locations of these buffers. The goal of this buffer insertion is to reduce the number of buffers and their ranges, while still maintaining a good yield improvement. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm can achieve a significant yield improvement (up to 35%) with only a small number of buffers.Comment: Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), 201

A Bulk-Parallel Priority Queue in External Memory with STXXL

We propose the design and an implementation of a bulk-parallel external memory priority queue to take advantage of both shared-memory parallelism and high external memory transfer speeds to parallel disks. To achieve higher performance by decoupling item insertions and extractions, we offer two parallelization interfaces: one using "bulk" sequences, the other by defining "limit" items. In the design, we discuss how to parallelize insertions using multiple heaps, and how to calculate a dynamic prediction sequence to prefetch blocks and apply parallel multiway merge for extraction. Our experimental results show that in the selected benchmarks the priority queue reaches 75% of the full parallel I/O bandwidth of rotational disks and and 65% of SSDs, or the speed of sorting in external memory when bounded by computation.Comment: extended version of SEA'15 conference pape