TEACHING IN THE CLOUD MICROELECTRONICS UBIQUITOUS LAB (MULAB)

CAD laboratory students activity is mandatory for microelectronics teaching. This, applied in the deep-submicron era, creates new challenges to couple software management simplicity to user friendliness inside lab sessions, which requires the use of complex tools and concepts. In this paper, a new approach to microelectronics CAD deployment is presented, based on virtualization capabilities of new servers hardware and software technology. A test case, realized at Politecnico di Torino, degree of Electronic Engineering, is presented, with real world results on resource consumption and user satisfactio

On the Stability Functional for Conservation Laws

This note is devoted to the explicit construction of a functional defined on all pairs of \L1 functions with small total variation, which is equivalent to the \L1 distance and non increasing along the trajectories of a given system of conservation laws. Two different constructions are provided, yielding an extension of the original stability functional by Bressan, Liu and Yang.Comment: 26 page

The Compressible to Incompressible Limit of 1D Euler Equations: the Non Smooth Case

We prove a rigorous convergence result for the compressible to incompressible limit of weak entropy solutions to the isothermal 1D Euler equations.Comment: 16 page

Policies for the regulation of coexistence between GM and conventional crops

Pollen-mediated gene flow is one of the main concerns associated with the introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops, since growers of GM varieties normally do not take into account its possible impact on conventional and organic growers therefore generating negative externalities. Should a premium for non-GM varieties emerge on the market, 'contamination' with GM pollen would generate a revenue loss for growers of non-GM varieties. The existence of such externalities has led the European Union (EU) to put forward the concept of coexistence in order to guarantee farmers' freedom to plant both conventional and GM varieties without generating economic losses to conventional farmers. The first part of this paper develops a simple economic model analysing the problem of pollen-mediated gene flow as a particular kind of production externality. The model, although simple, provides useful insights into the policy needed to regulate coexistence. Since pollen-mediated gene flow is distance-dependent, the externalities will depend on the spatial structure of GM adoption in the landscape. The second part of the paper, taking GM herbicide tolerant oilseed rape (Brassica napus) as a model crop, uses a Monte Carlo experiment to generate data and then estimate the effect of some important policy variables (i.e. number of GM and conventional fields in the landscape, width of buffer zones and spatial aggregation) on the magnitude of the externality associated with pollen-mediated gene flow. Our results show that buffer areas on conventional fields are more effective than those on GM fields and that the degree of spatial aggregation exerts the largest marginal effect on the externality to conventional growers. The implications of the results for the coexistence policies in the EU are then discussed.coexistence, pollen-mediated gene flow, Monte Carlo simulation, Crop Production/Industries,

Dissipation and Topologically Massive Gauge Theories in Pseudoeuclidean Plane

In the pseudo-euclidean metrics Chern-Simons gauge theory in the infrared region is found to be associated with dissipative dynamics. In the infrared limit the Lagrangian of 2+1 dimensional pseudo-euclidean topologically massive electrodynamics has indeed the same form of the Lagrangian of the damped harmonic oscillator. On the hyperbolic plane a set of two damped harmonic oscillators, each other time-reversed, is shown to be equivalent to a single undamped harmonic oscillator. The equations for the damped oscillators are proven to be the same as the ones for the Lorentz force acting on two particles carrying opposite charge in a constant magnetic field and in the electric harmonic potential. This provides an immediate link with Chern-Simons-like dynamics of Bloch electrons in solids propagating along the lattice plane with hyperbolic energy surface. The symplectic structure of the reduced theory is finally discussed in the Dirac constrained canonical formalism.Comment: 22 pages, LaTe

Enumeration of RNA structures by Matrix Models

We enumerate the number of RNA contact structures according to their genus, i.e. the topological character of their pseudoknots. By using a recently proposed matrix model formulation for the RNA folding problem, we obtain exact results for the simple case of an RNA molecule with an infinitely flexible backbone, in which any arbitrary pair of bases is allowed. We analyze the distribution of the genus of pseudoknots as a function of the total number of nucleotides along the phosphate-sugar backbone.Comment: RevTeX, 4 pages, 2 figure

Statistical Power Supply Dynamic Noise Prediction in Hierarchical Power Grid and Package Networks

One of the most crucial high performance systems-on-chip design challenge is to front their power supply noise sufferance due to high frequencies, huge number of functional blocks and technology scaling down. Marking a difference from traditional post physical-design static voltage drop analysis, /a priori dynamic voltage drop/evaluation is the focus of this work. It takes into account transient currents and on-chip and package /RLC/ parasitics while exploring the power grid design solution space: Design countermeasures can be thus early defined and long post physical-design verification cycles can be shortened. As shown by an extensive set of results, a carefully extracted and modular grid library assures realistic evaluation of parasitics impact on noise and facilitates the power network construction; furthermore statistical analysis guarantees a correct current envelope evaluation and Spice simulations endorse reliable result