HIGH EFFICIENCY EDGE COUPLER, NOVEL NONLINEAR OPTICAL POLYMERS WITH LARGE KERR-COEFFICIENT AND AUTOMATIC LAYOUT GENERATION IN SILICON PHOTONICS

The potential of on-chip photonics is limited by the difficulty in coupling light from optical fibers to on-chip waveguides. Specifically, 3rd-order nonlinear on-chip photonics usually requires high optical power. Hence the first major focus of this research is to design high-efficiency edge couplers. To achieve this goal, loss mechanisms of basic inverse taper couplers are analyzed and experimentally verified. Then a cantilever-encapsulated inverse taper is demonstrated to further lower coupling loss compared to basic inverse tapers. Nonetheless, both couplers are designed to couple with lensed fibers. Hence for flat fibers with larger mode-field-diameter (MFD), a novel sub-wavelength grating based edge coupler is proposed and experimentally demonstrated to have 1.9dB/facet loss. Eventually a silicon multi-section taper with intermediate SU-8 waveguide cladding is proposed for flat fibers with even larger MFD and experimentally verified. Based on the result several suggestions are proposed for further improvement

Practical Control-Flow Integrity

Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is effective at defending against prevalent control-flow hijacking attacks. CFI extracts a control-flow graph (CFG) for a given program and instruments the program to respect the CFG. Specifically, checks are inserted before indirect branch instructions. Before these instructions are executed during runtime, the checks consult the CFG to ensure that the indirect branch is allowed to reach the intended target. Hence, any sort of control-flow hijacking would be prevented.However, CFI traditionally suffered from several problems that thwarted its practicality. The first problem is about precise CFG generation. CFI’s security squarely relies on the CFG, therefore the more precise the CFG is, the more security CFI improves, but precise CFG generation was considered hard. The second problem is modularity, or support for dynamic linking. When two CFI modules are linked together dynamically, their CFGs also need to be merged. However, the merge process has to be thread-safe to avoid concurrency issues. The third problem is efficiency. CFI instrumentation adds extra instructions to programs, so it is critical to minimize the performance impact of the CFI checks. Fourth, interoperability is required for CFI solutions to enable gradual adoption in practice, which means that CFI-instrumented modules can be linked with uninstrumented modules without breaking the program.In this dissertation, we propose several practical solutions to the above problems. To generate a precise CFG, we compile the program being protected using a modified compilation toolchain, which can propagate source-level information such as type information to the binary level. At runtime, such information is gathered to generate a relatively precise CFG. On top of this CFG, we further instrument the code so that only if a function’s address is dynamically taken can it be reachable. This approach results in lazily computed per-input CFGs, which provide better precision. To address modularity, we design a lightweight Software Transactional Memory (STM) algorithm to synchronize accesses to the CFG’s data structure at runtime. To minimize the performance overhead, we optimize the CFG representation and access operations so that no heavy buslockinginstructions are needed. For interoperability, we consider addresses in uninstrumented modules as special targets and make the CFI instrumentation aware of them. Finally, we propose a new architecture for Just-In-Time compilers to adopt our proposed CFI schemes

Changes in plant species richness distribution in Tibetan alpine grasslands under different precipitation scenarios

Species richness is the core of biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) research. Nevertheless, it is difficult to accurately predict changes in plant species richness under different climate scenarios, especially in alpine biomes. In this study, we surveyed plant species richness from 2009 to 2017 in 75 alpine meadows (AM), 199 alpine steppes (AS), and 71 desert steppes (DS) in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, China. Along with 20 environmental factors relevant to species settlement, development, and survival, we first simulated the spatial pattern of plant species richness under current climate conditions using random forest modelling. Our results showed that simulated species richness matched well with observed values in the field, showing an evident decrease from meadows to steppes and then to deserts. Summer precipitation, which ranked first among the 20 environmental factors, was further confirmed to be the most critical driver of species richness distribution. Next, we simulated and compared species richness patterns under four different precipitation scenarios, increasing and decreasing summer precipitation by 20% and 10%, relative to the current species richness pattern. Our findings showed that species richness in response to altered precipitation was grassland-type specific, with meadows being sensitive to decreasing precipitation, steppes being sensitive to increasing precipitation, and deserts remaining resistant. In addition, species richness at low elevations was more sensitive to decreasing precipitation than to increasing precipitation, implying that droughts might have stronger influences than wetting on species composition. In contrast, species richness at high elevations (also in deserts) changed slightly under different precipitation scenarios, likely due to harsh physical conditions and small species pools for plant recruitment and survival. Finally, we suggest that policymakers and herdsmen pay more attention to alpine grasslands in central Tibet and at low elevations where species richness is sensitive to precipitation changes