Power MOSFET Thermal Instability Operation Characterization Support

Metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) are used extensively in flight hardware and ground support equipment. In the quest for faster switching times and lower "on resistance," the MOSFETs designed from 1998 to the present have achieved most of their intended goals. In the quest for lower on resistance and higher switching speeds, the designs now being produced allow the charge-carrier dominated region (once small and outside of the area of concern) to become important and inside the safe operating area (SOA). The charge-carrier dominated region allows more current to flow as the temperature increases. The higher temperatures produce more current resulting in the beginning of thermal runaway. Thermal runaway is a problem affecting a wide range of modern MOSFETs from more than one manufacturer. This report contains information on MOSFET failures, their causes and test results and information dissemination

Bering - The first deep space mission to map asteroidal diversity, origin and transportation

Asteroids are remnants of the material from which the Solar System formed. Fragments of asteroids, in the form of meteorites, include samples of the first solid matter to form in our Solar System 4.5 mia years ago. Spectroscopic studies of asteroids show that they, like the meteorites, range from very primitive objects to highly evolved small Earth-like planets that differentiated into core mantle and crust. The asteroid belt displays systematic variations in abundance of asteroid types from the more evolved types in the inner belt to the more primitive objects in the outer reaches of the belt thus bridging the gap between the inner evolved apart of the Solar System and the outer primitive part of the Solar System. High-speed collisions between asteroids are gradually resulting in their break-up. The size distribution of kilometer-sized asteroids implies that the presently un-detected population of sub-kilometer asteroids far outnumber the known larger objects. Sub-kilometer asteroids are expected to provide unique insight into the evolution of the asteroid belt and to the meteorite-asteroid connection. We propose a space mission to detect and characterize sub-kilometer asteroids between Jupiter and Venus. The mission is named Bering after the famous navigator and explorer Vitus Bering. A key feature of the mission is an advanced payload package, providing full on board autonomy of both object detection and tracking, which is required in order to study fast moving objects in deep space. The autonomy has the added advantage of reducing the cost of running the mission to a minimum, thus enabling science to focus on the main objectives.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, Recent Advances in Space Technologies, IEEE proceedings XX, in pres

Investigating tiredness in Australian general practice. Do pathology tests help in diagnosis?

Melbourn

Profitability and Nitrate Leaching Effects of Possible Farming Practice and System Changes Over South Dakota\u27s Big Sioux Aquifer: Case Farm No. 3 Summary

The overall goal of the SARE/Water Quality project was to determine whether economic incentives offered by recent environmental provisions of the Federal farm program are sufficient to induce Western Corn Belt/Northern Great Plains farmers in environmentally sensitive areas to adopt sustainable farming practices and systems. To attain this goal, four case farms were chosen to be involved in this study based on their size, soil types, cropping systems, topography, and management in the Big Sioux Aquifer study area. Case Farm No.3 is located in Minnehaha County and has corn, soybeans, oats, alfalfa, and clover. It is a dry-land operation that uses conventional tillage. The total operation consists of 168 acres, with 108 of the acres under the Water Quality Incentive program (WQIP) being focused on in the study. The acres are divided into two separate fields that are managed differently. A corn/soybean rotation is followed on the lower field and inorganic fertilizers were used. The upper field contains two different rotations. One rotation is a corn/oats,clover rotation and the other is a corn/oats,alf/alf/alf/alf/alf rotation. The majority of the soils on the lower field under WQIP are a combination of medium (Brandt), and coarse textured (La Prairie) soils. Both of these soils overlay a shallow drinking water aquifer. The upper field was mostly Moody soils (medium-textured). These soils don\u27t overlay an aquifer, but contribute to the runoff onto the lower field

Profitability and Nitrate Leaching Effects of Possible Farming Practice and System Changes Over South Dakota\u27s Big Sioux Aquifer: Case Farm No. 2 Summary

The overall goal of the SARE/Water Quality project was to determine whether economic incentives offered by recent environmental provisions of Federal farm program are sufficient to induce Western Corn Belt/Northern Plains farmers in environmentally sensitive areas to adopt sustainable fa practices and systems. To attain this goal, four case farms were chosen involved in this study based on their size, soil types, cropping systems, topography, and management in the Big Sioux Aquifer study area. Case Farm No. 2 is located in Moody County and followed a corn-soybean oats rotation on the acres focused on in the analysis prior to enrollment the Integrated Crop Management (ICM) program. It is a dry-land operation used conventional tillage prior to enrollment in the ICM program. The total operation consists of 1,858 acres, with 710 acres under the ICM program focused on 299 of those ICM acres in our analyses. Lamo and Clamo soils up the majority of the ICM crop acres. These are medium to fine-textured soils overlying a shallow drinking water aquifer

Profitability and Nitrate Leaching Effects of Possible Farming Practice and System Changes Over South Dakota\u27s Big Sioux Aquifer: Case Farm No. 4 Summary

The overall goal of the SARE/Water Quality project was to determine whether economic incentives offered by recent environmental provisions of the Federal farm program are sufficient to induce Western Corn Belt/Northern Great Plains farmers in environmentally sensitive areas to adopt sustainable farming practices and systems. To attain this goal, four case farms were chosen to be involved in this study based on their size, soil types, cropping systems, topography, and management in the Big Sioux Aquifer study area. Case Farm No. 4 is located in Brookings County and followed a continuous corn rotation prior to enrollment in the Water Quality Incentive Program (WQIP). It is an irrigated operation that uses a center-pivot system. Conventional tillage practices are used. The total operation consists of 838 acres, with 213 acres enrolled in the WQIP program. One hundred and fifty of those acres received irrigation management assistance. In one 73-acre field irrigated by a center-pivot system, 66 acres were assumed to be under the center-pivot system and the other 7 acres were assumed to be in the corners of the field where the center-pivot system could not reach. These 7 acres were designated as the set-aside acres for the baseline before scenario. This 73-acre field was focused on in our analyses. The majority of the soils in this field are a combination of coarse-textured (Fordville), and fine-textured (Marysland) soils. Both of these soils overlay a shallow drinking water aquife

Profitability and Nitrate Leaching Effects of Possible Farming Practice and System Changes Over South Dakota\u27s Big Sioux Aquifer: Case Farm No. 1 Summary

The overall goal of the SARE/Water Quality project was to determine whether economic incentives offered by recent environmental provisions of the Federal farm program are sufficient to induce Western Corn Belt/Northern Great Plains farmers in environmentally sensitive areas to adopt sustainable farming practices and systems. To attain this goal, four case farms were chosen to be involved in this study based on their size, soil types, cropping systems, topography, and management in the Big Sioux Aquifer study area

Profitability and Nitrate Leaching Effects of Possible Farming Practice and System Changes Over South Dakota\u27s Big Sioux Aquifer: Case Farm No. 1 Summary

The overall goal of the SARE/Water Quality project was to determine whether economic incentives offered by recent environmental provisions of the Federal farm program are sufficient to induce Western Corn Belt/Northern Great Plains farmers in environmentally sensitive areas to adopt sustainable farming practices and systems. To attain this goal, four case farms were chosen to be involved in this study based on their size, soil types, cropping systems, topography, and management in the Big Sioux Aquifer study area

Profitability and Nitrate Leaching Effects of Possible Farming Practice and System Changes Over South Dakota\u27s Big Sioux Aquifer: Case Farm No. 1 Summary

The overall goal of the SARE/Water Quality project was to determine whether economic incentives offered by recent environmental provisions of the Federal farm program are sufficient to induce Western Corn Belt/Northern Great Plains farmers in environmentally sensitive areas to adopt sustainable farming practices and systems. To attain this goal, four case farms were chosen to be involved in this study based on their size, soil types, cropping systems, topography, and management in the Big Sioux Aquifer study area

Performance Optimization on big.LITTLE Architectures:A Memory-latency Aware Approach

The energy demands of modern mobile devices have driven a trend towards heterogeneous multi-core systems which include various types of core tuned for performance or energy efficiency, offering a rich optimization space for software. On such systems, data coherency between cores is automatically ensured by an interconnect between processors. On some chip designs the performance of this interconnect, and by extension of the entire CPU cluster, is highly dependent on the software's memory access characteristics and on the set of frequencies of each CPU core. Existing frequency scaling mechanisms in operating systems use a simple load-based heuristic to tune CPU frequencies, and so fail to achieve a holistically good configuration across such diverse clusters. We propose a new adaptive governor to solve this problem, which uses a simple trained hardware model of cache interconnect characteristics, along with real-time hardware monitors, to continually adjust core frequencies to maximize system performance. We evaluate our governor on the Exynos5422 SoC, as used in the Samsung Galaxy S5, across a range of standard benchmarks. This shows that our approach achieves a speedup of up to 40%, and a 70% energy saving, including a 30% speedup in common mobile applications such as video decoding and web browsing