54,854 research outputs found
Meeting the design challenges of nano-CMOS electronics: an introduction to an upcoming EPSRC pilot project
The years of âhappy scalingâ are over and the fundamental challenges that the semiconductor industry faces, at both technology and device level, will impinge deeply upon the design of future integrated circuits and systems. This paper provides an introduction to these challenges and gives an overview of the Grid infrastructure that will be developed as part of a recently funded EPSRC pilot project to address them, and we hope, which will revolutionise the electronics design industry
Asynchronous Circuit Stacking for Simplified Power Management
As digital integrated circuits (ICs) continue to increase in complexity, new challenges arise for designers. Complex ICs are often designed by incorporating multiple power domains therefore requiring multiple voltage converters to produce the corresponding supply voltages. These converters not only take substantial on-chip layout area and/or off-chip space, but also aggregate the power loss during the voltage conversions that must occur fast enough to maintain the necessary power supplies. This dissertation work presents an asynchronous Multi-Threshold NULL Convention Logic (MTNCL) âstackedâ circuit architecture that alleviates this problem by reducing the number of voltage converters needed to supply the voltage the ICs operate at. By stacking multiple MTNCL circuits between power and ground, supplying a multiple of VDD to the entire stack and incorporating simple control mechanisms, the dynamic range fluctuation problem can be mitigated. A 130nm Bulk CMOS process and a 32nm Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) CMOS process are used to evaluate the theoretical effect of stacking different circuitry while running different workloads. Post parasitic physical implementations are then carried out in the 32nm SOI process for demonstrating the feasibility and analyzing the advantages of the proposed MTNCL stacking architecture
A review of advances in pixel detectors for experiments with high rate and radiation
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments ATLAS and CMS have established
hybrid pixel detectors as the instrument of choice for particle tracking and
vertexing in high rate and radiation environments, as they operate close to the
LHC interaction points. With the High Luminosity-LHC upgrade now in sight, for
which the tracking detectors will be completely replaced, new generations of
pixel detectors are being devised. They have to address enormous challenges in
terms of data throughput and radiation levels, ionizing and non-ionizing, that
harm the sensing and readout parts of pixel detectors alike. Advances in
microelectronics and microprocessing technologies now enable large scale
detector designs with unprecedented performance in measurement precision (space
and time), radiation hard sensors and readout chips, hybridization techniques,
lightweight supports, and fully monolithic approaches to meet these challenges.
This paper reviews the world-wide effort on these developments.Comment: 84 pages with 46 figures. Review article.For submission to Rep. Prog.
Phy
Towards Tamper-Evident Storage on Patterned Media
We propose a tamper-evident storage system based on probe storage with a patterned magnetic medium. This medium supports normal read/write operations by out-of-plane magnetisation of individual magnetic dots. We report on measurements showing that in principle the medium also supports a separate class of write-once operation that destroys the out-of-plane magnetisation property of the dots irreversibly by precise local heating. We discuss the main issues of designing a tamper-evident storage device and file system using the properties of the medium
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Quadrature LC VCO with passive coupling and phase combining network
A circuit and method for generating a signal is disclosed. The circuit includes a set of wide tuning LC tanks, a set of core transistors cross coupled to the set of wide tuning LC tanks, and a combining network coupled to the set of wide tuning LC tanks and the set of core transistors. The combining network further includes a set of inputs connected to the set of wide tuning LC tanks and the set of core transistors, a set of coupling transistors connected to the set of inputs, a set of source inductors connected to the set of coupling transistors, a coupling capacitor connected to the set of source inductors, a load resistor connected to the coupling capacitor. The combining network combines the set of inputs and the signal is delivered to the load resistor as a fourth order harmonic.Board of Regents, University of Texas Syste
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Preparing sparse solvers for exascale computing.
Sparse solvers provide essential functionality for a wide variety of scientific applications. Highly parallel sparse solvers are essential for continuing advances in high-fidelity, multi-physics and multi-scale simulations, especially as we target exascale platforms. This paper describes the challenges, strategies and progress of the US Department of Energy Exascale Computing project towards providing sparse solvers for exascale computing platforms. We address the demands of systems with thousands of high-performance node devices where exposing concurrency, hiding latency and creating alternative algorithms become essential. The efforts described here are works in progress, highlighting current success and upcoming challenges. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science'
Optimal Control of Transient Flow in Natural Gas Networks
We outline a new control system model for the distributed dynamics of
compressible gas flow through large-scale pipeline networks with time-varying
injections, withdrawals, and control actions of compressors and regulators. The
gas dynamics PDE equations over the pipelines, together with boundary
conditions at junctions, are reduced using lumped elements to a sparse
nonlinear ODE system expressed in vector-matrix form using graph theoretic
notation. This system, which we call the reduced network flow (RNF) model, is a
consistent discretization of the PDE equations for gas flow. The RNF forms the
dynamic constraints for optimal control problems for pipeline systems with
known time-varying withdrawals and injections and gas pressure limits
throughout the network. The objectives include economic transient compression
(ETC) and minimum load shedding (MLS), which involve minimizing compression
costs or, if that is infeasible, minimizing the unfulfilled deliveries,
respectively. These continuous functional optimization problems are
approximated using the Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto (LGL) pseudospectral collocation
scheme to yield a family of nonlinear programs, whose solutions approach the
optima with finer discretization. Simulation and optimization of time-varying
scenarios on an example natural gas transmission network demonstrate the gains
in security and efficiency over methods that assume steady-state behavior
A Network Coding Approach to Loss Tomography
Network tomography aims at inferring internal network characteristics based
on measurements at the edge of the network. In loss tomography, in particular,
the characteristic of interest is the loss rate of individual links and
multicast and/or unicast end-to-end probes are typically used. Independently,
recent advances in network coding have shown that there are advantages from
allowing intermediate nodes to process and combine, in addition to just
forward, packets. In this paper, we study the problem of loss tomography in
networks with network coding capabilities. We design a framework for estimating
link loss rates, which leverages network coding capabilities, and we show that
it improves several aspects of tomography including the identifiability of
links, the trade-off between estimation accuracy and bandwidth efficiency, and
the complexity of probe path selection. We discuss the cases of inferring link
loss rates in a tree topology and in a general topology. In the latter case,
the benefits of our approach are even more pronounced compared to standard
techniques, but we also face novel challenges, such as dealing with cycles and
multiple paths between sources and receivers. Overall, this work makes the
connection between active network tomography and network coding
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