64 research outputs found
Modeling of thermally induced skew variations in clock distribution network
Clock distribution network is sensitive to large thermal gradients on the die as the performance of both clock buffers and interconnects are affected by temperature. A robust clock network design relies on the accurate analysis of clock skew subject to temperature variations. In this work, we address the problem of thermally induced clock skew modeling in nanometer CMOS technologies. The complex thermal behavior of both buffers and interconnects are taken into account. In addition, our characterization of the temperature effect on buffers and interconnects provides valuable insight to designers about the potential impact of thermal variations on clock networks. The use of industrial standard data format in the interface allows our tool to be easily integrated into existing design flow
Italian Offshore Platform and Depleted Reservoir Conversion in the Energy Transition Perspective
New hypotheses for reusing platforms reaching their end-of-life have been investigated
in several works, discussing the potential conversions of these infrastructures from recreational
tourism to fish farming. In this perspective paper, we discuss the conversion options that could
be of interest in the context of the current energy transition, with reference to the off-shore Italian
scenario. The study was developed in support of the development of a national strategy aimed
at favoring a circular economy and the reuse of existing infrastructure for the implementation of
the energy transition. Thus, the investigated options include the onboard production of renewable
energy, hydrogen production from seawater through electrolyzers, CO2 capture and valorization,
and platform reuse for underground fluid storage in depleted reservoirs once produced through
platforms. Case histories are developed with reference to a typical, fictitious platform in the Adriatic
Sea, Italy, to provide an engineering-based approach to these different conversion options. The
coupling of the platform with the underground storage to set the optimal operational conditions is
managed through the forecast of the reservoir performance, with advanced numerical models able
to simulate the complexity of the phenomena occurring in the presence of coupled hydrodynamic,
geomechanical, geochemical, thermal, and biological processes. The results of our study are very
encouraging, because they reveal that no technical, environmental, or safety issues prevent the
conversion of offshore platforms into valuable infrastructure, contributing to achieving the energy
transition targets, as long as the selection of the conversion option to deploy is designed taking into
account the system specificity and including the depleted reservoir to which it is connected when
relevant. Socio-economic issues were not investigated, as they were out of the scope of the project
Sex difference and intra-operative tidal volume: Insights from the LAS VEGAS study
BACKGROUND: One key element of lung-protective ventilation is the use of a low tidal volume (VT). A sex difference in use of low tidal volume ventilation (LTVV) has been described in critically ill ICU patients.OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to determine whether a sex difference in use of LTVV also exists in operating room patients, and if present what factors drive this difference.DESIGN, PATIENTS AND SETTING: This is a posthoc analysis of LAS VEGAS, a 1-week worldwide observational study in adults requiring intra-operative ventilation during general anaesthesia for surgery in 146 hospitals in 29 countries.MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Women and men were compared with respect to use of LTVV, defined as VT of 8âmlâkg-1 or less predicted bodyweight (PBW). A VT was deemed 'default' if the set VT was a round number. A mediation analysis assessed which factors may explain the sex difference in use of LTVV during intra-operative ventilation.RESULTS: This analysis includes 9864 patients, of whom 5425 (55%) were women. A default VT was often set, both in women and men; mode VT was 500âml. Median [IQR] VT was higher in women than in men (8.6 [7.7 to 9.6] vs. 7.6 [6.8 to 8.4] mlâkg-1 PBW, Pâ<â0.001). Compared with men, women were twice as likely not to receive LTVV [68.8 vs. 36.0%; relative risk ratio 2.1 (95% CI 1.9 to 2.1), Pâ<â0.001]. In the mediation analysis, patients' height and actual body weight (ABW) explained 81 and 18% of the sex difference in use of LTVV, respectively; it was not explained by the use of a default VT.CONCLUSION: In this worldwide cohort of patients receiving intra-operative ventilation during general anaesthesia for surgery, women received a higher VT than men during intra-operative ventilation. The risk for a female not to receive LTVV during surgery was double that of males. Height and ABW were the two mediators of the sex difference in use of LTVV.TRIAL REGISTRATION: The study was registered at Clinicaltrials.gov, NCT01601223
Il Futuro della Cybersecurity in Italia: Ambiti Progettuali Strategici
Il presente volume nasce come continuazione del precedente, con lâobiettivo di delineare un insieme di ambiti progettuali e di azioni che la comunitĂ nazionale della ricerca ritiene essenziali a complemento e a supporto di quelli previsti nel DPCM Gentiloni in materia di sicurezza cibernetica, pubblicato nel febbraio del 2017. La lettura non richiede particolari conoscenze tecniche; il testo Ăš fruibile da chiunque utilizzi strumenti informatici o navighi in rete.
Nel volume vengono considerati molteplici aspetti della cybersecurity, che vanno dalla definizione di infrastrutture e centri necessari a organizzare la difesa alle azioni e alle tecnologie da sviluppare per essere protetti al meglio, dallâindividuazione delle principali tecnologie da difendere alla proposta di un insieme di azioni orizzontali per la formazione, la sensibilizzazione e la gestione dei rischi. Gli ambiti progettuali e le azioni, che noi speriamo possano svilupparsi nei prossimi anni in Italia, sono poi accompagnate da una serie di raccomandazioni agli organi preposti per affrontare al meglio, e da Paese consapevole, la sfida della trasformazione digitale. Le raccomandazioni non intendono essere esaustive, ma vanno a toccare dei punti che riteniamo essenziali per una corretta implementazione di una politica di sicurezza cibernetica a livello nazionale. Politica che, per sua natura, dovrĂ necessariamente essere dinamica e in continua evoluzione in base ai cambiamenti tecnologici, normativi, sociali e geopolitici. Allâinterno del volume, sono riportati dei riquadri con sfondo violetto o grigio; i primi sono usati nel capitolo introduttivo e nelle conclusioni per mettere in evidenza alcuni concetti ritenuti importanti, i secondi sono usati negli altri capitoli per spiegare il significato di alcuni termini tecnici comunemente utilizzati dagli addetti ai lavori.
In conclusione, ringraziamo tutti i colleghi che hanno contribuito a questo volume: un gruppo di oltre 120 ricercatori, provenienti da circa 40 tra Enti di Ricerca e UniversitĂ , unico per numerositĂ ed eccellenza, che rappresenta il meglio della ricerca in Italia nel settore della cybersecurity. Un grazie speciale va a Gabriella Caramagno e ad Angela Miola che hanno contribuito a tutte le fasi di produzione del libro. Tra i ringraziamenti ci fa piacere aggiungere il supporto ottenuto dai partecipanti al progetto FILIERASICURA
Omecamtiv mecarbil in chronic heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, GALACTICâHF: baseline characteristics and comparison with contemporary clinical trials
Aims:
The safety and efficacy of the novel selective cardiac myosin activator, omecamtiv mecarbil, in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) is tested in the Global Approach to Lowering Adverse Cardiac outcomes Through Improving Contractility in Heart Failure (GALACTICâHF) trial. Here we describe the baseline characteristics of participants in GALACTICâHF and how these compare with other contemporary trials.
Methods and Results:
Adults with established HFrEF, New York Heart Association functional class (NYHA)ââ„âII, EF â€35%, elevated natriuretic peptides and either current hospitalization for HF or history of hospitalization/ emergency department visit for HF within a year were randomized to either placebo or omecamtiv mecarbil (pharmacokineticâguided dosing: 25, 37.5 or 50âmg bid). 8256 patients [male (79%), nonâwhite (22%), mean age 65âyears] were enrolled with a mean EF 27%, ischemic etiology in 54%, NYHA II 53% and III/IV 47%, and median NTâproBNP 1971âpg/mL. HF therapies at baseline were among the most effectively employed in contemporary HF trials. GALACTICâHF randomized patients representative of recent HF registries and trials with substantial numbers of patients also having characteristics understudied in previous trials including more from North America (n = 1386), enrolled as inpatients (n = 2084), systolic blood pressureâ<â100âmmHg (n = 1127), estimated glomerular filtration rate <â30âmL/min/1.73 m2 (n = 528), and treated with sacubitrilâvalsartan at baseline (n = 1594).
Conclusions:
GALACTICâHF enrolled a wellâtreated, highârisk population from both inpatient and outpatient settings, which will provide a definitive evaluation of the efficacy and safety of this novel therapy, as well as informing its potential future implementation
Integration-aware Modeling, Simulation and Design Techniques for Smart Electronic Systems
Smart electronic systems represent a vast category of energy-autonomous and ubiquitously
connected systems that incorporate analog, digital and MEMS components,
combined with various kinds of sensors, actuators, energy storage devices and power
sources. Smart systems generally find applications in the worldwide market for
âMonitoring & Controlâ products and solutions, hence they are used in a broad
range of sectors, including automotive, healthcare, Internet of Things, ICT, safety
and security, and aerospace. In order to support such wide variety of application
scenarios, smart systems integrate a multitude of functionalities, technologies, and
materials. The design of smart systems is therefore a complex and major multidisciplinary
challenge, as it goes beyond the design of the individual components
and subsystems. New design and simulation methodologies are fundamental for
exploring the design space in order to find the most efficient trade-off between performance
and involved resources, and for evaluating and validating system behavior
taking into account the interactions between closely coupled components of different
nature. Current system level design methods must indeed accurately manage
increasing system complexity and interaction effects between the environment and
the system and among the components. Nevertheless, the involved components are
usually described using different languages, relying on different models of computation,
and need to be jointly simulated at various abstraction levels.
This dissertation aims at bridging this gap focusing on novel integration-aware
solutions for different aspects of a smart system: the design of digital subsystems and
components, the modeling of batteries, and the power estimation of smart systems
at system level of design abstraction.
Although the design flow of digital components is well consolidated and highly
standardized (e.g., commercial, fully automated synthesis & optimization tools, technology
libraries, etc.), additional integration-aware design constraints arise due to
the interaction of components of different technological domains and to the harsh
environment where smart systems typically operate. This work presents a methodology
for addressing these new constraints, thus enhancing the design of digital
components. As a partial fulfillment of such constraints results in a global degradation
of performance, the proposed methodology focuses on the effects rather than the physical sources of the constraints. This allows to move from the typical RTL
to a system level of abstraction, i.e., SystemC TLM, obtaining a faster validation of
the performance of digital subsystems.
Energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important for self-powered smart electronic
systems, as the amount of energy they can gather from the environment or
accumulate in storage devices cannot be considered constant over time. Power supplies
have therefore a very heterogeneous nature: depending on the application, more
than one type of power source (e.g., photovoltaic cells, thermoelectric or piezoelectric
energy generators) and storage device (e.g., rechargeable and non-rechargeable
batteries, supercapacitors, and fuel cells) could be hosted onto the system. As a matter
of fact, no single power source could provide the desired level of energy density,
power density, current, and voltage to the system for all possible workloads.
Batteries are being significantly used in smart electronic systems due to the their
increased energy capacity, improved production process, and lower cost over the last
years. However, a battery is an electrochemical device that involves complicated
chemical reactions resulting in many non-idealities of its behavior. Therefore, a
smart system designer has to characterize these non-idealities in order to accurately
model how the battery delivers power to the system. This dissertation introduces
a systematic methodology for the automatic construction of battery models from
datasheet information, thus avoiding costly and time-consuming measurements of
battery characteristics. This methodology allows generating models for several battery
charge and discharge characteristics with tunable accuracy according to the
amount of the available manufacturersâ data, and without any limitation in battery
chemistry, materials, form factor, and size.
Finally, this work introduces a modeling and simulation framework for the system
level estimation of power end energy flows in smart systems. Current simulationor
model-based design approaches do not target a smart system as a whole, but
rather single domains (digital, analog, power devices, etc.), and make use of proprietary
tools and pre-characterized models having fixed abstraction level and fixed
semantics. The proposed methodology uses principles borrowed from the system
level functional simulation of digital systems and extends them for simulating the
behavior of subsystems whose functionality is to generate, convert, or store energy
(e.g., power sources, voltage regulators, energy storage devices, etc.). This has been
done at system level using standard open-source tools such as SystemC AMS and
IP-XACT, which allow to explicitly represent current and voltage similarly to digital
logic signals. The implemented approach facilitates virtual prototyping, architecture
exploration, and integration validation, with high flexibility and modularity
Integration-aware Modeling, Simulation and Design Techniques for Smart Electronic Systems
Smart electronic systems represent a vast category of energy-autonomous and ubiquitously
connected systems that incorporate analog, digital and MEMS components,
combined with various kinds of sensors, actuators, energy storage devices and power
sources. Smart systems generally find applications in the worldwide market for
âMonitoring & Controlâ products and solutions, hence they are used in a broad
range of sectors, including automotive, healthcare, Internet of Things, ICT, safety
and security, and aerospace. In order to support such wide variety of application
scenarios, smart systems integrate a multitude of functionalities, technologies, and
materials. The design of smart systems is therefore a complex and major multidisciplinary
challenge, as it goes beyond the design of the individual components
and subsystems. New design and simulation methodologies are fundamental for
exploring the design space in order to find the most efficient trade-off between performance
and involved resources, and for evaluating and validating system behavior
taking into account the interactions between closely coupled components of different
nature. Current system level design methods must indeed accurately manage
increasing system complexity and interaction effects between the environment and
the system and among the components. Nevertheless, the involved components are
usually described using different languages, relying on different models of computation,
and need to be jointly simulated at various abstraction levels.
This dissertation aims at bridging this gap focusing on novel integration-aware
solutions for different aspects of a smart system: the design of digital subsystems and
components, the modeling of batteries, and the power estimation of smart systems
at system level of design abstraction.
Although the design flow of digital components is well consolidated and highly
standardized (e.g., commercial, fully automated synthesis & optimization tools, technology
libraries, etc.), additional integration-aware design constraints arise due to
the interaction of components of different technological domains and to the harsh
environment where smart systems typically operate. This work presents a methodology
for addressing these new constraints, thus enhancing the design of digital
components. As a partial fulfillment of such constraints results in a global degradation
of performance, the proposed methodology focuses on the effects rather than the physical sources of the constraints. This allows to move from the typical RTL
to a system level of abstraction, i.e., SystemC TLM, obtaining a faster validation of
the performance of digital subsystems.
Energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important for self-powered smart electronic
systems, as the amount of energy they can gather from the environment or
accumulate in storage devices cannot be considered constant over time. Power supplies
have therefore a very heterogeneous nature: depending on the application, more
than one type of power source (e.g., photovoltaic cells, thermoelectric or piezoelectric
energy generators) and storage device (e.g., rechargeable and non-rechargeable
batteries, supercapacitors, and fuel cells) could be hosted onto the system. As a matter
of fact, no single power source could provide the desired level of energy density,
power density, current, and voltage to the system for all possible workloads.
Batteries are being significantly used in smart electronic systems due to the their
increased energy capacity, improved production process, and lower cost over the last
years. However, a battery is an electrochemical device that involves complicated
chemical reactions resulting in many non-idealities of its behavior. Therefore, a
smart system designer has to characterize these non-idealities in order to accurately
model how the battery delivers power to the system. This dissertation introduces
a systematic methodology for the automatic construction of battery models from
datasheet information, thus avoiding costly and time-consuming measurements of
battery characteristics. This methodology allows generating models for several battery
charge and discharge characteristics with tunable accuracy according to the
amount of the available manufacturersâ data, and without any limitation in battery
chemistry, materials, form factor, and size.
Finally, this work introduces a modeling and simulation framework for the system
level estimation of power end energy flows in smart systems. Current simulationor
model-based design approaches do not target a smart system as a whole, but
rather single domains (digital, analog, power devices, etc.), and make use of proprietary
tools and pre-characterized models having fixed abstraction level and fixed
semantics. The proposed methodology uses principles borrowed from the system
level functional simulation of digital systems and extends them for simulating the
behavior of subsystems whose functionality is to generate, convert, or store energy
(e.g., power sources, voltage regulators, energy storage devices, etc.). This has been
done at system level using standard open-source tools such as SystemC AMS and
IP-XACT, which allow to explicitly represent current and voltage similarly to digital
logic signals. The implemented approach facilitates virtual prototyping, architecture
exploration, and integration validation, with high flexibility and modularity
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