Watermarking FPGA Bitfile for Intellectual Property Protection

Intellectual property protection (IPP) of hardware designs is the most important requirement for many Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) intellectual property (IP) vendors. Digital watermarking has become an innovative technology for IPP in recent years. Existing watermarking techniques have successfully embedded watermark into IP cores. However, many of these techniques share two specific weaknesses: 1) They have extra overhead, and are likely to degrade performance of design; 2) vulnerability to removing attacks. We propose a novel watermarking technique to watermark FPGA bitfile for addressing these weaknesses. Experimental results and analysis show that the proposed technique incurs zero overhead and it is robust against removing attacks

Correlations among superconductivity, structural instability, and band filling in Nb1-xB2 at the critical point x=0.2

We performed an extensive investigation on the correlations among superconductivity, structural instability and band filling in Nb1-xB2 materials. Structural measurements reveal that a notable phase transformation occurs at x=0.2, corresponding to the Fermi level (EF) in the pseudogap with the minimum total density of states (DOS) as demonstrated by the first-principles calculations. Superconductivity in Nb1-xB2 generally becomes visible in the Nb-deficient materials with x=0.2. Electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) measurements on B K-edge directly demonstrated the presence of a chemical shift arising from the structural transformation. Our systematical experimental results in combination with theoretical analysis suggest that the emergence of hole states in the sigma-bands plays an important role for understanding the superconductivity and structural transition in Nb1-xB2.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure

Relativistic Vlasov-Uehling-Uhlenbeck Equation for Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions

Journals published by the American Physical Society can be found at http://publish.aps.org

Entanglement detection via condition of quantum correlation

We develop a novel necessary condition of quantum correlation. It is utilized to construct $d$-level bipartite Bell-type inequality which is strongly resistant to noise and requires only analyses of $O(d)$ measurement outcomes compared to the previous result $O(d^{2})$. Remarkably, a connection between the arbitrary high-dimensional bipartite Bell-type inequality and entanglement witnesses is found. Through the necessary condition of quantum correlation, we propose that the witness operators to detect truly multipartite entanglement for a generalized Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state with two local measurement settings and a four-qubit singlet state with three settings. Moreover, we also propose the first robust entanglement witness to detect four-level tripartite GHZ state with only two local measurement settings

Comparison of nuclear transport models with 800A-MeV La + La data

Nuclear transport models including density- and momentum-dependent mean-field effects are compared to intranuclear-cascade models and tested on recent data on inclusive p-like cross sections for 800A-MeV La+La. We find a remarkable agreement between most model calculations but a systematic disagreement with the measured yield at 20°, possibly indicating a need for modification of nuclear transport properties at high densities

Optical properties of light-hole excitons in GaN epilayers

Optical properties of light-hole free exciton (FX B) in GaN epilayers were investigated by using near-resonance photoluminescence (PL) and time-resolved PL techniques. In contrast to the case of off-resonance PL where only heavy-hole free excitons (FX A) have strong response, FX B band can be well resolved in the near-resonance PL spectra. The variable-temperature near-resonance PL spectra show that the linewidth of FX B broadens faster than the FX A with increasing temperature. Moreover, the luminescence lifetime of FX B is found to be shorter than that of FX A. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.published_or_final_versio

Corticosteroids inhibit sphingosine 1-phosphate-induced interleukin-6 secretion from human airway smooth muscle via mitogen-activated protein kinase phosphatase 1-mediated repression of mitogen and stress-activated protein kinase 1

Sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P) is a bioactive sphingolipid that plays an important proinflammatory role in asthmatic airways. Corticosteroids are first-line antiinflammatories in asthma; however, their repressive effects on S1P-induced cytokine secretion have not been investigated. To address this, our in vitro study reveals the molecular mechanisms by which corticosteroids inhibit S1P-induced IL-6 expression in the pivotal immunomodulatory cell type, airway smooth muscle (ASM). We first uncover the cellular signaling pathways responsible: S1P activates a cyclic adenosine monophosphate/cAMP response-element-binding protein (CREB)/ CRE-dependent pathway to induce IL-6 transcription, concomitant with stimulation of the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) superfamily and downstream mitogen and stress-activated protein kinase 1 (MSK1) and histone H3 phosphorylation. In this way, S1P stimulates parallel signaling pathways to induce IL-6 secretion via CRE-driven transcription of the IL-6 gene promoter in a relaxed chromatin environment achieved through histone H3 phosphorylation. Second, we investigated how corticosteroids mediate their repressive effects. The corticosteroid dexamethasone inhibits S1P-induced IL-6 protein secretion and mRNA expression, but CREB/CRE transrepression, inhibition of IL-6 mRNA stability, or subcellular relocation of MSK1 were not responsible for the repressive effects of dexamethasone. Rather, we show that dexamethasone rapidly induces up-regulation of the MAPK deactivator MAPK phosphatase 1 (MKP-1) and that MKP-1 blocks the MAPK-driven activation of MSK1 and phosphorylation of histone H3. This was confirmed by treatment with triptolide, an inhibitor of MKP-1 up-regulation, where repressive effects of corticosteroids were reversed. Our study reveals the molecular mechanism underlying the antiinflammatory capacity of corticosteroids to repress proinflammatory functions induced by the potent bioactive sphingolipid S1P in the lung. Copyright © 2014 by the American Thoracic Society

Inner surface enhanced femtosecond second harmonic generation in thin ZnO crystal tubes

At room temperature, efficient second harmonic generation (SHG) emission is observed in thin ZnO crystal hollow rods (tubes) with diameter∼0.2 mm under the excitation of femtosecond laser from 700 to 860 nm. Power and polarization dependence of the SHG signal on the primary excitation beam is also measured. The multiple total reflections between the outer and inner surfaces of the sample are analyzed to be responsible for the efficient SHG. Ninefold amplification of SHG signal in the tube structure is estimated. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.published_or_final_versio