Improved sensitivity of an acid sphingomyelinase activity assay using a C6:0 sphingomyelin substrate

Short-chain C6-sphingomyelin is an artificial substrate that was used in an acid sphingomyelinase activity assay for a pilot screening study of patients with Niemann–Pick disease types A and B. Using previously published multiplex and single assay conditions, normal acid sphingomyelinase activity levels (i.e. false negative results) were observed in two sisters with Niemann–Pick B who were compound heterozygotes for two missense mutations, p.C92W and p.P184L, in the SMPD1 gene. Increasing the sodium taurocholate detergent concentration in the assay buffer lowered the activity levels of these two patients into the range observed with other patients with clear separation from normal controls

Combined approach of ROBDDs and structural analysis in the mapping and matching of logic functions

The technology mapping - final step of the logic synthesis - maps the decomposed Boolean function on physical cells. We address here the decomposition and the matching steps. We present two different ROBDD-based techniques to handle the decomposition problem, and compare them. For handling the matching step, we analyse a heuristics based on symmetry and develop a new structural approach, based on controlling value analysis and observation function deduction. This last appears to be efficient regarding the CPU time for checking the match with basic cells, mostly when don't cares are present, and should be particularly interesting to handle the complex cells of FPGAs. Benchmarks are presented which validate the various heuristics. Keywords ROBDD, technology mapping, decomposition, matching 1 INTRODUCTION Technology mapping is the last and decisive step in logic synthesis. It is usually performed after a technology independent minimization, which generates an optimized multi-level logic..

Rapid Prototyping for Heterogeneous Multicomponent Systems: An MPEG-4 Stream over a UMTS Communication Link

<p/> <p>Future generations of mobile phones, including advanced video and digital communication layers, represent a great challenge in terms of real-time embedded systems. Programmable multicomponent architectures can provide suitable target solutions combining flexibility and computation power. The aim of our work is to develop a fast and automatic prototyping methodology dedicated to signal processing application implementation on parallel heterogeneous architectures, two major features required by future systems. This paper presents the whole methodology based on the SynDEx CAD tool that directly generates a distributed implementation onto various platforms from a high-level application description, taking real-time aspects into account. It illustrates the methodology in the context of real-time distributed executives for multilayer applications based on an MPEG-4 video codec and a UMTS telecommunication link.</p