Selected Papers in Combinatorics - a Volume Dedicated to R.G. Stanton

Professor Stanton has had a very illustrious career. His contributions to mathematics are varied and numerous. He has not only contributed to the mathematical literature as a prominent researcher but has fostered mathematics through his teaching and guidance of young people, his organizational skills and his publishing expertise. The following briefly addresses some of the areas where Ralph Stanton has made major contributions

A lunar base reference mission for the phased implementation of bioregenerative life support system components

Previous design efforts of a cost effective and reliable regenerative life support system (RLSS) provided the foundation for the characterization of organisms or 'biological processors' in engineering terms and a methodology was developed for their integration into an engineered ecological LSS in order to minimize the mass flow imbalances between consumers and producers. These techniques for the design and the evaluation of bioregenerative LSS have now been integrated into a lunar base reference mission, emphasizing the phased implementation of components of such a BLSS. In parallel, a designers handbook was compiled from knowledge and experience gained during past design projects to aid in the design and planning of future space missions requiring advanced RLSS technologies. The lunar base reference mission addresses in particular the phased implementation and integration of BLS parts and includes the resulting infrastructure burdens and needs such as mass, power, volume, and structural requirements of the LSS. Also, operational aspects such as manpower requirements and the possible need and application of 'robotics' were addressed

The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer Book 2018

(Abridged) This is the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer 2018 book. It is intended as a concise reference guide to all aspects of the scientific and technical design of MSE, for the international astronomy and engineering communities, and related agencies. The current version is a status report of MSE's science goals and their practical implementation, following the System Conceptual Design Review, held in January 2018. MSE is a planned 10-m class, wide-field, optical and near-infrared facility, designed to enable transformative science, while filling a critical missing gap in the emerging international network of large-scale astronomical facilities. MSE is completely dedicated to multi-object spectroscopy of samples of between thousands and millions of astrophysical objects. It will lead the world in this arena, due to its unique design capabilities: it will boast a large (11.25 m) aperture and wide (1.52 sq. degree) field of view; it will have the capabilities to observe at a wide range of spectral resolutions, from R2500 to R40,000, with massive multiplexing (4332 spectra per exposure, with all spectral resolutions available at all times), and an on-target observing efficiency of more than 80%. MSE will unveil the composition and dynamics of the faint Universe and is designed to excel at precision studies of faint astrophysical phenomena. It will also provide critical follow-up for multi-wavelength imaging surveys, such as those of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, Gaia, Euclid, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, the Square Kilometre Array, and the Next Generation Very Large Array.Comment: 5 chapters, 160 pages, 107 figure

Metodologia Per la Caratterizzazione di amplificatori a basso rumore per UMTS

In questo lavoro si presenta una metodologia di progettazione elettronica a livello di sistema, affrontando il problema della caratterizzazione dello spazio di progetto dell' amplificatore a basso rumore costituente il primo stadio di un front end a conversione diretta per UMTS realizzato in tecnologia CMOS con lunghezza di canale .18u. La metodologia è sviluppata al fine di valutare in modo quantititativo le specifiche ottime di sistema per il front-end stesso e si basa sul concetto di Piattaforma Analogica, che prevede la costruzione di un modello di prestazioni per il blocco analogico basato su campionamento statistico di indici di prestazioni del blocco stesso, misurati tramite simulazione di dimensionamenti dei componenti attivi e passivi soddisfacenti un set di equazioni specifico della topologia circuitale. Gli indici di prestazioni vengono successivamente ulizzati per parametrizzare modelli comportamentali utilizzati nelle fasi di ottimizzazione a livello di sistema. Modelli comportamentali atti a rappresentare i sistemi RF sono stati pertanto studiati per ottimizzare la scelta delle metriche di prestazioni. L'ottimizzazione dei set di equazioni atti a selezionare le configurazione di interesse per il campionamento ha al tempo stesso richiesto l'approfondimento dei modelli di dispositivi attivi validi in tutte le regioni di funzionamento, e lo studio dettagliato della progettazione degli amplificatori a basso rumore basati su degenerazione induttiva. Inoltre, il problema della modellizzazione a livello di sistema degli effetti della comunicazione tra LNA e Mixer è stato affrontato proponendo e analizzando diverse soluzioni. Il lavoro ha permesso di condurre un'ottimizzazione del front-end UMTS, giungendo a specifiche ottime a livello di sistema per l'amplificatore stesso

High Performance Computing Algorithms for Accelerating Peptide Identification from Mass-Spectrometry Data Using Heterogeneous Supercomputers

Fast and accurate identification of peptides and proteins from the mass spectrometry (MS) data is a critical problem in modern systems biology. Database peptide search is the most commonly used computational method to identify peptide sequences from the MS data. In this method, giga-bytes of experimentally generated MS data are compared against tera-byte sized databases of theoretically simulated MS data resulting in a compute- and data-intensive problem requiring days or weeks of computational times on desktop machines. Existing serial and high performance computing (HPC) algorithms strive to accelerate and improve the computational efficiency of the search, but exhibit sub-optimal performances due to their inefficient parallelization models, low resource utilization and high overhead costs

Pioneer Jupiter orbiter probe mission 1980, probe description

The adaptation of the Saturn-Uranus Atmospheric Entry Probe (SUAEP) to a Jupiter entry probe is summarized. This report is extracted from a comprehensive study of Jovian missions, atmospheric model definitions and probe subsystem alternatives

Frequency Multipliers in SiGe BiCMOS for Local Oscillator Generation in D-band Wireless Transceivers

Communications at millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) have drawn a lot of attention in recent years due to the wide available bandwidth which translates directly to higher data transmission capacity. Generation of the transceivers local oscillation (LO) is critical because many contrasting requirements, i.e. tuning range (TR), phase noise (PN), output power, and level of spurious tones, affect the system performance. Differently from what is commonly pursued at Radio Frequency, LO generation with a PLL embedding a VCO at the desired output frequency is not viable at mm-wave. A more promising approach consists of a PLL in the 10-20GHz range, where silicon VCOs feature the best figure of merit, followed by a frequency multiplier. In this thesis, a frequency multiplication chain is investigated to up-convert an LO signal from X-band to D-band by a multiplication factor of 12. The multiplication is done in steps of 3, 2, and 2. A sextupler chip comprises the tripler and the first doubler and the last doubler stage which upconverts the LO signal from E- to D-band is realized in a separate chip, all in a 55nm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The frequency tripler circuit is based on a novel circuit topology which yields a remarkable improvement on the suppression of the driving signal frequency at the output, compared to conventional designs exploiting transistors in class-C. The active core of the circuit approximates the transfer characteristic of a third-order polynomial that ideally produces only a third-harmonic of the input signal. Implemented in a separate break-out chip and consuming 23mW of DC power, the tripler demonstrates ~40dB suppression of the input signal and its 5th harmonic over 16% fractional bandwidth and robustness to power variation of the driving signal over a 15dB range. Including the E-band doubler, the sextupler chip achieves a peak output power of 1.7dBm at 74.4GHz and remains within 2dB variation from 70GHz to 82GHz, corresponding to 16% fractional BW. In this frequency range, the leakages of all harmonics are suppressed by more than 40dBc. The design of the D-band doubler was aimed at delivering high output power with high efficiency and high conversion gain. Toward this end, the efficiency of a push-push pair was improved by a stacked Colpitts oscillator to boost the power conversion gain by 10dB. Moreover, the common-collector configuration keeps separate the oscillator tank from the load, allowing independent optimization of the harmonic conversion efficiency and the load impedance for maximum power delivery. The measured performance of the test chip demonstrated Pout up to 8dBm at 130GHz with 13dB conversion gain and 6.3% Power Added Efficiency