Development of Fast Protection System with Xilinx ZYNQ SoC for RAON Heavy-Ion Accelerator

The development of the fast protection system (FPS) was driven by the critical need to safeguard internal components of the accelerator from beam damage and minimize operational downtime. During accelerator operation, various faults can occur, posing a significant risk. The FPS acts as a rapid response system, initiating a shutdown signal to a reliable chopper system to prevent beam damage and ensure the operational availability of the accelerator. To meet the stringent shut off time requirements specific to critical faults, the FPS was designed to respond within 50 µs, while the total FPS time, including acquisition, redundancy, and processing, needed to be less than 20 µs. In order to achieve these goals, a customized FPS was developed for the RAON heavy-ion accelerator, utilizing the Xilinx ZYNQ system-on-chip (SoC). The FPS system comprised seven acquisition modules, one mitigation module with an embedded SoC, and employed optical fiber connections for efficient data transmission. This article provides a comprehensive account of the design, development, and testing of the FPS system. Experimental tests were conducted to validate its performance. These tests included verifying the accuracy of cyclic redundancy checks, acquiring interlock signals in short pulses, and measuring the delay time during abnormal signal occurrences. Of particular significance is the measurement of the total signal processing time for a 1 km optical cable in the RAON system, which was determined to be 9.8 µs. This result successfully met the stringent requirement of 20 µs for the FPS time. The ability of the FPS to operate within the desired time frame demonstrates its effectiveness in protecting the accelerator’s components from beam damage and minimizing downtime. Consequently, the FPS ensures the operational availability of the accelerator while maintaining the safety and integrity of its internal systems. By providing a detailed account of the FPS’s design, development, and testing, this article contributes valuable insights into the capabilities of the FPS in real-world accelerator scenarios. The successful implementation of the RAON-optimized FPS with the Xilinx ZYNQ SoC reaffirms its effectiveness as a fast and reliable protection system, thus enhancing the overall operational performance of the accelerator

Purification, crystallization, and X-ray crystallographic analysis of Vac8p complexed with Atg13p from Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Vac8p is a vacuolar protein that plays pivotal roles in both vacuole inheritance and the formation of nucleus vacuole junction (NVJ) in yeast. The Vac8p directly interacts with Atg13p, a component of the autophagy machinery, and mediates cytoplasm-to-vacuole targeting (Cvt) pathway, resulting in the maturation of aminopeptidase I (Ape1p). Here, we coexpressed and purified Saccharomyces cerevisiae Vac8p complexed with Atg13p in Escherichia coli bacteria cells, and crystallized the complex proteins under the condition of 25% (v/v) PEG 400, 100 mM Tris pH 8.5, 2% (v/v) Ethylene glycol, 2% (w/v) PEG 3350, 1.5% (w/v) PEG 20000, 5 mM DTT at 293K. X-ray diffraction data of the crystals were collected to 2.9 Å resolution at the synchrotron radiation. The crystals belong to the orthorhombic space group P212121 with unit cell parameters a = 62.7 Å, b = 92.4 Å, and c = 139.9 Å. The asymmetric unit contains one Vac8p-Atg13p heterodimer with a corresponding VM of 2.92 Å3 Da-1 and solvent content of 57.8%

Application of Deep Reinforcement Learning to Dynamic Verification of DRAM Designs

This paper presents a deep neural network based test vector generation method for dynamic verification of memory devices. The proposed method is built on reinforcement learning framework, where the action is input stimulus on device pins and the reward is coverage score of target circuitry. The developed agent efficiently explores high-dimensional and large action space by using policy gradient method with ??-nearest neighbor search, transfer learning, and replay buffer. The generated test vectors attained the coverage score of 100% for fifteen representative circuit blocks of modern DRAM design. The output vector length was only 7% of the human-created vector length

ROGDI defines a GABAergic input to a dopaminergic neural circuit to promote sleep in Drosophila

Kohlschutter-Tönz syndrome (KTS) is a rare genetic disorder characterized by severe developmental delay with neurological dysfunction such as epilepsy, psychomotor regression and intellectual disability. While genetic mutations in a human homolog of Rogdi gene have been linked to the development of KTS, its neural basis remains elusive. Here we establish a Drosophila model of KTS to demonstrate a novel role of Rogdi in GABAergic transmission. Our genetic screen initially identified a hypomorphic mutation in Drosophila Rogdi that supressed daily baseline sleep. The short sleep phenotypes were rescued by transgenic Rogdi expression in GABAergic neurons or by the oral administration of a GABA transaminase inhibitor that enhances GABAergic signaling. An enhancer trap line originated from Rogdi locus displayed its expression in sleep-regulatory neurons of adult fly brains, including GABA-positive neurons. Furthermore, RNA interference-mediated depletion of vesicular GABA transporter in Rogdi-expressing neurons decreased sleep, largely phenocoping Rogdi mutants. Notably, Rogdi effects on sleep were masked by genetic or pharmacological inhibition of dopaminergic transmission, newly defining a dopaminergic circuit as a downstream target of Rogdi-dependent sleep. Taken together, these data suggest that ROGDI sustains GABAergic transmission to promote sleep. Given the strong relevance of KTS phenotypes to GABA, our findings provide the first neural clues important for understanding KTS pathogenesis

Highly reliable 50nm contact cell technology for 256Mb PRAM

Novel small contact fabrication technologies were proposed to realize reliable high density 256Mb PRAM(Phase Change Memory) product. Introducing the 2-step CMP (Chemical Mechanical Polishing) process and the ring-shaped contact structure, the contact area distribution was greatly improved even at the smallest contact diameter of 50nm node. The validity of this approach was directly confirmed by the evaluation of the functionality for the fabricated 256Mbit PRAM based on 0. 10??m CMOS technology