Scientific Rationale and Requirements for a Global Seismic Network on Mars

Following a brief overview of the mission concepts for a Mars Global Network Mission as of the time of the workshop, we present the principal scientific objectives to be achieved by a Mars seismic network. We review the lessons for extraterrestrial seismology gained from experience to date on the Moon and on Mars. An important unknown on Mars is the expected rate of seismicity, but theoretical expectations and extrapolation from lunar experience both support the view that seismicity rates, wave propagation characteristics, and signal-to-noise ratios are favorable to the collection of a scientifically rich dataset during the multiyear operation of a global seismic experiment. We discuss how particular types of seismic waves will provide the most useful information to address each of the scientific objectives, and this discussion provides the basis for a strategy for station siting. Finally, we define the necessary technical requirements for the seismic stations

BREAKING RENT’S RULE: OPPORTUNITIES FOR 3D INTERCONNECT NETWORKS

Stochastic estimates of wire-length based on Rent’s rule predict a benefit of 3D integration over traditional ICs, tapering off with a 50 % reduction for 8 tiers. However, Rent’s rule is unnecessarily pessimistic, because it assumes an extrapolation of architectures that were conceived in two dimensions. This paper examines the gains possible in several 3D interconnect network topologies. Placement experiments with a 64-node 3-cube network show that a 75 % reduction is possible with 4 tiers, and larger gains are possible with larger networks. Architectures for systems limited by nearest-neighbor communication are discussed, which are likely to show the most benefit from 3D integration

To my wife

Multiple Input Multiple Output(MIMO) technique promises substantial increase of wireless channel capacity by using antenna arrays at both transmitters and receivers. It is one of the key technology to be used in the third generation wireless communication applications and is a current theme of international wireless research. Hardware implementation of MIMO receiver in today’s wireless applications has stringent requirements such as high throughput, low power and high per-formance. This brings the difficulties to carry out the desired ASIC chip which is feasible to current silicon process. In this thesis, we introduce a new System-on-a-Chip(SoC) design for the 3G Code Division Multiple Access(3G-CDMA) MIMO receiver. The SoC chip consists of a space-time equalizer, a MIMO detector and a turbo decoder onto a single chip, which can be configured to handle different modulation schemes including QPSK and 16QAM according to the signal-to-noise ratio(SNR). At low SNR, QPSK modulation scheme can provide lower bit error rate(BER), while at high SNR, 16QAM scheme can have a larger throughput. Sphere decoding algorithm is used for MIMO de-tection to achieve near maximum likelihood (ML) performance with relatively lower complexity for practical silicon implementation. To improve the system performance further, we implement a turbo decode, which decode the transmitted information bits using the soft decision result from the sphere decoder. Our design can achieve much lower BER than other current MIMO ASICs in the low SNR range. The paper also analyze the trade-off between the hardware complexity and the BER performance of the MIMO receiver using MATLAB fixed-point simulation and hardware synthesis

An Automated Design Flow for Low-Power, High-Throughput,

A system-level perspective of a hierarchical automated design flow for low-energy direct-mapped signal processing integrated circuits is presented. Capturing design decisions in a dataflow graph allows push-button automation of layout and performance estimation. A detailed example of the design process for a DSSS TDMA baseband receiver is presented