Under-the-cell routing to improve manufacturability

The progressive miniaturization of technology and the unequal scalability of the BEOL and FEOL layers aggravate the routing congestion problem and have a negative impact on manufacturability. Standard cells are designed in a way that they can be treated as black boxes during physical design. However, this abstraction often prevents an efficient use of its internal free resources. This paper proposes an effective approach for using internal routing resources without sacrificing modularity. By using cell generation tools for regular layouts, libraries are enriched with cell instances that have lateral pins and allow under-the-cell connections between adjacent cells, thus reducing pin count, via count and routing congestion. An approach to generate cells with regular layouts and lateral pins is proposed. Additionally, algorithms to maximize the impact of under-the-cell routing are presented. The proposed techniques are integrated in an industrial design flow. Experimental results show a significant reduction of design rule check violations with negligible impact on timing.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Incidencia y significancia de las estructuras císticas en ovarios de gádidos

Fish regulate egg production by atresia. Sometimes, oocytes are encapsulated in cystic structures that might remain in the ovary for months, altering female reproductive potential in future spawning seasons. Ovaries of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua, L.) from the Flemish Cap and European hake (Merluccius merluccius, L.) from the Galician Shelf (NW Spain) were analysed from 1999 to 2006. The prevalence and abundance of ovarian cysts were estimated. Cyst prevalence increased with female size and/or age for both species, and decreased with high condition factor in hake. Cyst intensity does not correlate with any analysed factor. The size/age structure of spawning stock biomass and female condition could affect the prevalence of cysts in the ovaries, though it does not seem to affect cyst intensity in the ovary. Further research is needed to determine cyst resorption time and the impact that it has on egg production and consequently on stock reproductive potential.Los peces regulan la producción de huevos a través de la atresia. En ocasiones, los ovocitos son encapsulados en estructuras quísticas que podrían permanecer en el ovario durante meses, alterando el potencial reproductivo de las hembras en estaciones de puesta posteriores. Se tomaron ovarios de bacalao (Gadus morhua, L.) de Flemish Cap y de merluza europea (Merluccius merluccius, L.) de la costa gallega (NO España) entre 1999 y 2006. Se estimó la prevalencia e intensidad de quistes en estos ovarios. En ambas especies la prevalencia de hembras con quistes aumentó con la talla y/o edad y disminuyó al aumentar el factor de condición en el caso de la merluza. La intensidad de quistes no se correlacionó con ninguna de las variables estudiadas. La estructura de talla/edades del stock reproductor y la condición de las hembras podría afectar la prevalencia de hembras con quistes. Son necesarios más estudios para determinar el tiempo de reabsorción de estos quistes y las consecuencias que esto puede tener en la producción de huevos y por tanto en el potencial reproductivo de los stocks

Handling Missing Annotations for Semantic Segmentation with Deep ConvNets

International audienceAnnotation of medical images for semantic segmentation is a very time consuming and difficult task. Moreover, clinical experts often focus on specific anatomical structures and thus, produce partially annotated images. In this paper, we introduce SMILE, a new deep con-volutional neural network which addresses the issue of learning with incomplete ground truth. SMILE aims to identify ambiguous labels in order to ignore them during training, and don't propagate incorrect or noisy information. A second contribution is SMILEr which uses SMILE as initialization for automatically relabeling missing annotations, using a curriculum strategy. Experiments on 3 organ classes (liver, stomach, pancreas) show the relevance of the proposed approach for semantic seg-mentation: with 70% of missing annotations, SMILEr performs similarly as a baseline trained with complete ground truth annotations