Seven strategies for tolerating highly defective fabrication

In this article we present an architecture that supports fine-grained sparing and resource matching. The base logic structure is a set of interconnected PLAs. The PLAs and their interconnections consist of large arrays of interchangeable nanowires, which serve as programmable product and sum terms and as programmable interconnect links. Each nanowire can have several defective programmable junctions. We can test nanowires for functionality and use only the subset that provides appropriate conductivity and electrical characteristics. We then perform a matching between nanowire junction programmability and application logic needs to use almost all the nanowires even though most of them have defective junctions. We employ seven high-level strategies to achieve this level of defect tolerance

Fault Secure Encoder and Decoder for NanoMemory Applications

Memory cells have been protected from soft errors for more than a decade; due to the increase in soft error rate in logic circuits, the encoder and decoder circuitry around the memory blocks have become susceptible to soft errors as well and must also be protected. We introduce a new approach to design fault-secure encoder and decoder circuitry for memory designs. The key novel contribution of this paper is identifying and defining a new class of error-correcting codes whose redundancy makes the design of fault-secure detectors (FSD) particularly simple. We further quantify the importance of protecting encoder and decoder circuitry against transient errors, illustrating a scenario where the system failure rate (FIT) is dominated by the failure rate of the encoder and decoder. We prove that Euclidean geometry low-density parity-check (EG-LDPC) codes have the fault-secure detector capability. Using some of the smaller EG-LDPC codes, we can tolerate bit or nanowire defect rates of 10% and fault rates of 10^(-18) upsets/device/cycle, achieving a FIT rate at or below one for the entire memory system and a memory density of 10^(11) bit/cm^2 with nanowire pitch of 10 nm for memory blocks of 10 Mb or larger. Larger EG-LDPC codes can achieve even higher reliability and lower area overhead

Fault-tolerant sub-lithographic design with rollback recovery

Shrinking feature sizes and energy levels coupled with high clock rates and decreasing node capacitance lead us into a regime where transient errors in logic cannot be ignored. Consequently, several recent studies have focused on feed-forward spatial redundancy techniques to combat these high transient fault rates. To complement these studies, we analyze fine-grained rollback techniques and show that they can offer lower spatial redundancy factors with no significant impact on system performance for fault rates up to one fault per device per ten million cycles of operation (Pf = 10^-7) in systems with 10^12 susceptible devices. Further, we concretely demonstrate these claims on nanowire-based programmable logic arrays. Despite expensive rollback buffers and general-purpose, conservative analysis, we show the area overhead factor of our technique is roughly an order of magnitude lower than a gate level feed-forward redundancy scheme

Utilization of the VHF, UHF, SHF, and EHF frequency bands by radars of civilian & military aeronautics

Tato bakalářská práce se zabývá radarovou technikou, kterou se autor pokusil přehledně seřadit pro studijní potřeby následujících ročníků studentů bakalářského studia oboru profesionální pilot. Soustřeďuje se zejména na význam kmitočtových pásem u jednotlivých radarů a jejich dopad na vlastnosti radaru.This bachelor thesis deals with radar technology. Author tried clearly sort this thesis as study source for following students of the field professional pilot. It is focused on importance of frequency bands of selected radars and their impact on radar properties

ANTIQUE: A Non-Factoid Question Answering Benchmark

Considering the widespread use of mobile and voice search, answer passage retrieval for non-factoid questions plays a critical role in modern information retrieval systems. Despite the importance of the task, the community still feels the significant lack of large-scale non-factoid question answering collections with real questions and comprehensive relevance judgments. In this paper, we develop and release a collection of 2,626 open-domain non-factoid questions from a diverse set of categories. The dataset, called ANTIQUE, contains 34,011 manual relevance annotations. The questions were asked by real users in a community question answering service, i.e., Yahoo! Answers. Relevance judgments for all the answers to each question were collected through crowdsourcing. To facilitate further research, we also include a brief analysis of the data as well as baseline results on both classical and recently developed neural IR models

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE HERITAGE PRESERVATION

Nowadays, heritage conservators are required to have not only a wide variety of technical but also social and human skills. The shift from a material-based conservation to an approach that focuses on subjects instead of objects (Muñoz Viñas, 2005, p. 147) is a structural approach in contemporary theories of conservation. This tendency towards subjectivity created many possibilities by exposing the multiple perspectives that surround a conservation object. At the same time, it made very clear that conservation objects are contextual and contingent (Clavir, 2009, p. 141). This dichotomy between the tangible and intangible features of a conservation object, however, has been successively overlooked in most conservation endeavours. Prior to the conservation decision-making, institutions usually identified the main stakeholders, with publics and communities being part of that sphere together with owners, artists, and conservators, among others. The decision-making process, however, does not engage with communities in practice. This situation is very problematic for the conservation of cultural heritage objects in general, but it becomes truly hazardous for the preservation of cultural heritage with strong intangible features, such as social artistic practices, ethnographic objects, public art, participatory or performance art or even built heritage, which necessarily involves strong cooperation with communities and artists. After all, to whom are conservators preserving cultural heritage? What is the purpose of conserving cultural heritage for “future generations” if “present generations” are not called to decide in that process? This paper attempts to reflect upon these questions through histories around two buildings in Lisbon that had relevant roles during the Portuguese dictatorship (1933-1974).Nowadays, heritage conservators are required to have not only a wide variety of technical but also social and human skills. The shift from a material-based conservation to an approach that focuses on subjects instead of objects (Muñoz Viñas, 2005, p. 147) is a structural approach in contemporary theories of conservation. This tendency towards subjectivity created many possibilities by exposing the multiple perspectives that surround a conservation object. At the same time, it made very clear that conservation objects are contextual and contingent (Clavir, 2009, p. 141). This dichotomy between the tangible and intangible features of a conservation object, however, has been successively overlooked in most conservation endeavours. Prior to the conservation decision-making, institutions usually identified the main stakeholders, with publics and communities being part of that sphere together with owners, artists, and conservators, among others. The decision-making process, however, does not engage with communities in practice. This situation is very problematic for the conservation of cultural heritage objects in general, but it becomes truly hazardous for the preservation of cultural heritage with strong intangible features, such as social artistic practices, ethnographic objects, public art, participatory or performance art or even built heritage, which necessarily involves strong cooperation with communities and artists. After all, to whom are conservators preserving cultural heritage? What is the purpose of conserving cultural heritage for “future generations” if “present generations” are not called to decide in that process? This paper attempts to reflect upon these questions through histories around two buildings in Lisbon that had relevant roles during the Portuguese dictatorship (1933-1974)