Development of a Non-Invasive On-Chip Interconnect Health Sensing Method Based on Bit Error Rates

Electronic products and systems are widely used in industrial network systems, control devices, and data acquisition devices across many industry sectors. Failures of such electronic systems might lead to unexpected downtime, loss of productivity, additional work for repairs, and delay in product and service development. Thus, developing an appropriate sensing technique is necessary, because it is the first step in system fault diagnosis and prognosis. Many sensing techniques often require external and additional sensing devices, which might disturb system operation and consequently increase operating costs. In this study, we present an on-chip health sensing method for non-destructive and non-invasive interconnect degradation detection. Bit error rate (BER), which represents data integrity during digital signal transmission, was selected to sense interconnect health without connecting external sensing devices. To verify the health sensing performance, corrosion tests were conducted with in situ monitoring of the BER and direct current (DC) resistance. The eye size, extracted from the BER measurement, showed the highest separation between the intact and failed interconnect, as well as a gradual transition, compared with abrupt changes in the DC resistance, during interconnect degradation. These experimental results demonstrate the potential of the proposed sensing method for on-chip interconnect health monitoring applications without disturbing system operation

Error resilient video transcoding for robust inter-network communications using GPRS

A novel fully comprehensive mobile video communications system is proposed in this paper. This system exploits the useful rate management features of the video transcoders and combines them with error resilience for transmissions of coded video streams over general packet radio service (GPRS) mobileaccess networks. The error-resilient video transcoding operation takes place at a centralized point, referred to as a video proxy, which provides the necessary output transmission rates with the required amount of robustness. With the use of this proposed algorithm, error resilience can be added to an already compressed video stream at an intermediate stage at the edge of two or more different networks through two resilience schemes, namely the adaptive intra refresh (AIR) and feedback control signaling (FCS) methods. Both resilience tools impose an output rate increase which can also be prevented with the proposed novel technique in this paper. Thus, an error-resilient video transcoding scheme is presented to give robust video outputs at near target transmission rates that only require the same number of GPRS timeslots as the nonresilient schemes. Moreover, an ultimate robustness is also accomplished with the combination of the two resilience algorithms at the video proxy. Extensive computer simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system

Optimisation of IrDA IrLAP link access protocol

The widespread installation of millions of Infrared Data Association (IrDA) infrared (IR) ports in mobile devices for wireless communication applications necessitates for throughput performance optimization of the IR links at the IrDA link access protocol (IrLAP) link layer. For IrDA connectivity, link-layer throughput optimization is important for any line bit-error rate (BER). The paper provides a mathematical model with which we derive a simple equation linking IrLAP throughput with physical and link-layer parameters. Simple equations for optimum values of window size and frame length for maximum link-layer throughput as a function of BER are derived. A study of the importance of parameters such as link minimum turnaround time and -timer time out period is presented. Finally, a protocol improvement that utilizes special supervisory frames (frames) to pass transmission control is proposed to deal with delays introduced by -timer expiration. Results indicate that employing the special frame highly improves throughput performance when optimum window and frame-size values are implemented