CMOS array design automation techniques

A low cost, quick turnaround technique for generating custom metal oxide semiconductor arrays using the standard cell approach was developed, implemented, tested and validated. Basic cell design topology and guidelines are defined based on an extensive analysis that includes circuit, layout, process, array topology and required performance considerations particularly high circuit speed

Wireless communication, identification and sensing technologies enabling integrated logistics: a study in the harbor environment

In the last decade, integrated logistics has become an important challenge in the development of wireless communication, identification and sensing technology, due to the growing complexity of logistics processes and the increasing demand for adapting systems to new requirements. The advancement of wireless technology provides a wide range of options for the maritime container terminals. Electronic devices employed in container terminals reduce the manual effort, facilitating timely information flow and enhancing control and quality of service and decision made. In this paper, we examine the technology that can be used to support integration in harbor's logistics. In the literature, most systems have been developed to address specific needs of particular harbors, but a systematic study is missing. The purpose is to provide an overview to the reader about which technology of integrated logistics can be implemented and what remains to be addressed in the future

Statistical Physics of Design

Modern life increasingly relies on complex products that perform a variety of functions. The key difficulty of creating such products lies not in the manufacturing process, but in the design process. However, design problems are typically driven by multiple contradictory objectives and different stakeholders, have no obvious stopping criteria, and frequently prevent construction of prototypes or experiments. Such ill-defined, or "wicked" problems cannot be "solved" in the traditional sense with optimization methods. Instead, modern design techniques are focused on generating knowledge about the alternative solutions in the design space. In order to facilitate such knowledge generation, in this dissertation I develop the "Systems Physics" framework that treats the emergent structures within the design space as physical objects that interact via quantifiable forces. Mathematically, Systems Physics is based on maximal entropy statistical mechanics, which allows both drawing conceptual analogies between design problems and collective phenomena and performing numerical calculations to gain quantitative understanding. Systems Physics operates via a Model-Compute-Learn loop, with each step refining our thinking of design problems. I demonstrate the capabilities of Systems Physics in two very distinct case studies: Naval Engineering and self-assembly. For the Naval Engineering case, I focus on an established problem of arranging shipboard systems within the available hull space. I demonstrate the essential trade-off between minimizing the routing cost and maximizing the design flexibility, which can lead to abrupt phase transitions. I show how the design space can break into several locally optimal architecture classes that have very different robustness to external couplings. I illustrate how the topology of the shipboard functional network enters a tight interplay with the spatial constraints on placement. For the self-assembly problem, I show that the topology of self-assembled structures can be reliably encoded in the properties of the building blocks so that the structure and the blocks can be jointly designed. The work presented here provides both conceptual and quantitative advancements. In order to properly port the language and the formalism of statistical mechanics to the design domain, I critically re-examine such foundational ideas as system-bath coupling, coarse graining, particle distinguishability, and direct and emergent interactions. I show that the design space can be packed into a special information structure, a tensor network, which allows seamless transition from graphical visualization to sophisticated numerical calculations. This dissertation provides the first quantitative treatment of the design problem that is not reduced to the narrow goals of mathematical optimization. Using statistical mechanics perspective allows me to move beyond the dichotomy of "forward" and "inverse" design and frame design as a knowledge generation process instead. Such framing opens the way to further studies of the design space structures and the time- and path-dependent phenomena in design. The present work also benefits from, and contributes to the philosophical interpretations of statistical mechanics developed by the soft matter community in the past 20 years. The discussion goes far beyond physics and engages with literature from materials science, naval engineering, optimization problems, design theory, network theory, and economic complexity.PHDPhysicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163133/1/aklishin_1.pd

NETEMBED: A Network Resource Mapping Service for Distributed Applications

Emerging configurable infrastructures such as large-scale overlays and grids, distributed testbeds, and sensor networks comprise diverse sets of available computing resources (e.g., CPU and OS capabilities and memory constraints) and network conditions (e.g., link delay, bandwidth, loss rate, and jitter) whose characteristics are both complex and time-varying. At the same time, distributed applications to be deployed on these infrastructures exhibit increasingly complex constraints and requirements on resources they wish to utilize. Examples include selecting nodes and links to schedule an overlay multicast file transfer across the Grid, or embedding a network experiment with specific resource constraints in a distributed testbed such as PlanetLab. Thus, a common problem facing the efficient deployment of distributed applications on these infrastructures is that of "mapping" application-level requirements onto the network in such a manner that the requirements of the application are realized, assuming that the underlying characteristics of the network are known. We refer to this problem as the network embedding problem. In this paper, we propose a new approach to tackle this combinatorially-hard problem. Thanks to a number of heuristics, our approach greatly improves performance and scalability over previously existing techniques. It does so by pruning large portions of the search space without overlooking any valid embedding. We present a construction that allows a compact representation of candidate embeddings, which is maintained by carefully controlling the order via which candidate mappings are inserted and invalid mappings are removed. We present an implementation of our proposed technique, which we call NETEMBED – a service that identify feasible mappings of a virtual network configuration (the query network) to an existing real infrastructure or testbed (the hosting network). We present results of extensive performance evaluation experiments of NETEMBED using several combinations of real and synthetic network topologies. Our results show that our NETEMBED service is quite effective in identifying one (or all) possible embeddings for quite sizable queries and hosting networks – much larger than what any of the existing techniques or services are able to handle.National Science Foundation (CNS Cybertrust 0524477, NSF CNS NeTS 0520166, NSF CNS ITR 0205294, EIA RI 0202067

Technical Design Report for the PANDA Micro Vertex Detector

This document illustrates the technical layout and the expected performance of the Micro Vertex Detector (MVD) of the PANDA experiment. The MVD will detect charged particles as close as possible to the interaction zone. Design criteria and the optimisation process as well as the technical solutions chosen are discussed and the results of this process are subjected to extensive Monte Carlo physics studies. The route towards realisation of the detector is outlined

Integrated IT and SDN Orchestration of multi-domain multi-layer transport networks

Telecom operators networks' management and control remains partitioned by technology, equipment supplier and networking layer. In some segments, the network operations are highly costly due to the need of the individual, and even manual, configuration of the network equipment by highly specialized personnel. In multi-vendor networks, expensive and never ending integration processes between Network Management Systems (NMSs) and the rest of systems (OSSs, BSSs) is a common situation, due to lack of adoption of standard interfaces in the management systems of the different equipment suppliers. Moreover, the increasing impact of the new traffic flows introduced by the deployment of massive Data Centers (DCs) is also imposing new challenges that traditional networking is not ready to overcome. The Fifth Generation of Mobile Technology (5G) is also introducing stringent network requirements such as the need of connecting to the network billions of new devices in IoT paradigm, new ultra-low latency applications (i.e., remote surgery) and vehicular communications. All these new services, together with enhanced broadband network access, are supposed to be delivered over the same network infrastructure. In this PhD Thesis, an holistic view of Network and Cloud Computing resources, based on the recent innovations introduced by Software Defined Networking (SDN), is proposed as the solution for designing an end-to-end multi-layer, multi-technology and multi-domain cloud and transport network management architecture, capable to offer end-to-end services from the DC networks to customers access networks and the virtualization of network resources, allowing new ways of slicing the network resources for the forthcoming 5G deployments. The first contribution of this PhD Thesis deals with the design and validation of SDN based network orchestration architectures capable to improve the current solutions for the management and control of multi-layer, multi-domain backbone transport networks. These problems have been assessed and progressively solved by different control and management architectures which has been designed and evaluated in real evaluation environments. One of the major findings of this work has been the need of developed a common information model for transport network's management, capable to describe the resources and services of multilayer networks. In this line, the Control Orchestration Protocol (COP) has been proposed as a first contriution towards an standard management interface based on the main principles driven by SDN. Furthermore, this PhD Thesis introduces a novel architecture capable to coordinate the management of IT computing resources together with inter- and intra-DC networks. The provisioning and migration of virtual machines together with the dynamic reconfiguration of the network has been successfully demonstrated in a feasible timescale. Moreover, a resource optimization engine is introduced in the architecture to introduce optimization algorithms capable to solve allocation problems such the optimal deployment of Virtual Machine Graphs over different DCs locations minimizing the inter-DC network resources allocation. A baseline blocking probability results over different network loads are also presented. The third major contribution is the result of the previous two. With a converged cloud and network infrastructure controlled and operated jointly, the holistic view of the network allows the on-demand provisioning of network slices consisting of dedicated network and cloud resources over a distributed DC infrastructure interconnected by an optical transport network. The last chapters of this thesis discuss the management and orchestration of 5G slices based over the control and management components designed in the previous chapters. The design of one of the first network slicing architectures and the deployment of a 5G network slice in a real Testbed, is one of the major contributions of this PhD Thesis.La gestión y el control de las redes de los operadores de red (Telcos), todavía hoy, está segmentado por tecnología, por proveedor de equipamiento y por capa de red. En algunos segmentos (por ejemplo en IP) la operación de la red es tremendamente costosa, ya que en muchos casos aún se requiere con guración individual, e incluso manual, de los equipos por parte de personal altamente especializado. En redes con múltiples proveedores, los procesos de integración entre los sistemas de gestión de red (NMS) y el resto de sistemas (p. ej., OSS/BSS) son habitualmente largos y extremadamente costosos debido a la falta de adopción de interfaces estándar por parte de los diferentes proveedores de red. Además, el impacto creciente en las redes de transporte de los nuevos flujos de tráfico introducidos por el despliegue masivo de Data Centers (DC), introduce nuevos desafíos que las arquitecturas de gestión y control de las redes tradicionales no están preparadas para afrontar. La quinta generación de tecnología móvil (5G) introduce nuevos requisitos de red, como la necesidad de conectar a la red billones de dispositivos nuevos (Internet de las cosas - IoT), aplicaciones de ultra baja latencia (p. ej., cirugía a distancia) y las comunicaciones vehiculares. Todos estos servicios, junto con un acceso mejorado a la red de banda ancha, deberán ser proporcionados a través de la misma infraestructura de red. Esta tesis doctoral propone una visión holística de los recursos de red y cloud, basada en los principios introducidos por Software Defined Networking (SDN), como la solución para el diseño de una arquitectura de gestión extremo a extremo (E2E) para escenarios de red multi-capa y multi-dominio, capaz de ofrecer servicios de E2E, desde las redes intra-DC hasta las redes de acceso, y ofrecer ademas virtualización de los recursos de la red, permitiendo nuevas formas de segmentación en las redes de transporte y la infrastructura de cloud, para los próximos despliegues de 5G. La primera contribución de esta tesis consiste en la validación de arquitecturas de orquestración de red, basadas en SDN, para la gestión y control de redes de transporte troncales multi-dominio y multi-capa. Estos problemas (gestion de redes multi-capa y multi-dominio), han sido evaluados de manera incremental, mediante el diseño y la evaluación experimental, en entornos de pruebas reales, de diferentes arquitecturas de control y gestión. Uno de los principales hallazgos de este trabajo ha sido la necesidad de un modelo de información común para las interfaces de gestión entre entidades de control SDN. En esta línea, el Protocolo de Control Orchestration (COP) ha sido propuesto como interfaz de gestión de red estándar para redes SDN de transporte multi-capa. Además, en esta tesis presentamos una arquitectura capaz de coordinar la gestión de los recursos IT y red. La provisión y la migración de máquinas virtuales junto con la reconfiguración dinámica de la red, han sido demostradas con éxito en una escala de tiempo factible. Además, la arquitectura incorpora una plataforma para la ejecución de algoritmos de optimización de recursos capaces de resolver diferentes problemas de asignación, como el despliegue óptimo de Grafos de Máquinas Virtuales (VMG) en diferentes DCs que minimizan la asignación de recursos de red. Esta tesis propone una solución para este problema, que ha sido evaluada en terminos de probabilidad de bloqueo para diferentes cargas de red. La tercera contribución es el resultado de las dos anteriores. La arquitectura integrada de red y cloud presentada permite la creación bajo demanda de "network slices", que consisten en sub-conjuntos de recursos de red y cloud dedicados para diferentes clientes sobre una infraestructura común. El diseño de una de las primeras arquitecturas de "network slicing" y el despliegue de un "slice" de red 5G totalmente operativo en un Testbed real, es una de las principales contribuciones de esta tesis.La gestió i el control de les xarxes dels operadors de telecomunicacions (Telcos), encara avui, està segmentat per tecnologia, per proveïdors d’equipament i per capes de xarxa. En alguns segments (Per exemple en IP) l’operació de la xarxa és tremendament costosa, ja que en molts casos encara es requereix de configuració individual, i fins i tot manual, dels equips per part de personal altament especialitzat. En xarxes amb múltiples proveïdors, els processos d’integració entre els Sistemes de gestió de xarxa (NMS) i la resta de sistemes (per exemple, Sistemes de suport d’operacions - OSS i Sistemes de suport de negocis - BSS) són habitualment interminables i extremadament costosos a causa de la falta d’adopció d’interfícies estàndard per part dels diferents proveïdors de xarxa. A més, l’impacte creixent en les xarxes de transport dels nous fluxos de trànsit introduïts pel desplegament massius de Data Centers (DC), introdueix nous desafiaments que les arquitectures de gestió i control de les xarxes tradicionals que no estan llestes per afrontar. Per acabar de descriure el context, la cinquena generació de tecnologia mòbil (5G) també presenta nous requisits de xarxa altament exigents, com la necessitat de connectar a la xarxa milers de milions de dispositius nous, dins el context de l’Internet de les coses (IOT), o les noves aplicacions d’ultra baixa latència (com ara la cirurgia a distància) i les comunicacions vehiculars. Se suposa que tots aquests nous serveis, juntament amb l’accés millorat a la xarxa de banda ampla, es lliuraran a través de la mateixa infraestructura de xarxa. Aquesta tesi doctoral proposa una visió holística dels recursos de xarxa i cloud, basada en els principis introduïts per Software Defined Networking (SDN), com la solució per al disseny de una arquitectura de gestió extrem a extrem per a escenaris de xarxa multi-capa, multi-domini i consistents en múltiples tecnologies de transport. Aquesta arquitectura de gestió i control de xarxes transport i recursos IT, ha de ser capaç d’oferir serveis d’extrem a extrem, des de les xarxes intra-DC fins a les xarxes d’accés dels clients i oferir a més virtualització dels recursos de la xarxa, obrint la porta a noves formes de segmentació a les xarxes de transport i la infrastructura de cloud, pels propers desplegaments de 5G. La primera contribució d’aquesta tesi doctoral consisteix en la validació de diferents arquitectures d’orquestració de xarxa basades en SDN capaces de millorar les solucions existents per a la gestió i control de xarxes de transport troncals multi-domini i multicapa. Aquests problemes (gestió de xarxes multicapa i multi-domini), han estat avaluats de manera incremental, mitjançant el disseny i l’avaluació experimental, en entorns de proves reals, de diferents arquitectures de control i gestió. Un dels principals troballes d’aquest treball ha estat la necessitat de dissenyar un model d’informació comú per a les interfícies de gestió de xarxes, capaç de descriure els recursos i serveis de la xarxes transport multicapa. En aquesta línia, el Protocol de Control Orchestration (COP, en les seves sigles en anglès) ha estat proposat en aquesta Tesi, com una primera contribució cap a una interfície de gestió de xarxa estàndard basada en els principis bàsics de SDN. A més, en aquesta tesi presentem una arquitectura innovadora capaç de coordinar la gestió de els recursos IT juntament amb les xarxes inter i intra-DC. L’aprovisionament i la migració de màquines virtuals juntament amb la reconfiguració dinàmica de la xarxa, ha estat demostrat amb èxit en una escala de temps factible. A més, l’arquitectura incorpora una plataforma per a l’execució d’algorismes d’optimització de recursos, capaços de resoldre diferents problemes d’assignació, com el desplegament òptim de Grafs de Màquines Virtuals (VMG) en diferents ubicacions de DC que minimitzen la assignació de recursos de xarxa entre DC. També es presenta una solució bàsica per a aquest problema, així com els resultats de probabilitat de bloqueig per a diferents càrregues de xarxa. La tercera contribució principal és el resultat dels dos anteriors. Amb una infraestructura de xarxa i cloud convergent, controlada i operada de manera conjunta, la visió holística de la xarxa permet l’aprovisionament sota demanda de "network slices" que consisteixen en subconjunts de recursos d’xarxa i cloud, dedicats per a diferents clients, sobre una infraestructura de Data Centers distribuïda i interconnectada per una xarxa de transport òptica. Els últims capítols d’aquesta tesi tracten sobre la gestió i organització de "network slices" per a xarxes 5G en funció dels components de control i administració dissenyats i desenvolupats en els capítols anteriors. El disseny d’una de les primeres arquitectures de "network slicing" i el desplegament d’un "slice" de xarxa 5G totalment operatiu en un Testbed real, és una de les principals contribucions d’aquesta tesi.Postprint (published version