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 8 ml kg-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 500 ml. 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] ml kg-1 PBW, P < 0.001). 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), P < 0.001]. 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 l’obiettivo di delineare un insieme di ambiti progettuali e di azioni che la comunità 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 è 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, dall’individuazione 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, dovrà necessariamente essere dinamica e in continua evoluzione in base ai cambiamenti tecnologici, normativi, sociali e geopolitici. All’interno 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 Università, unico per numerosità 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, GALACTIC‐HF: 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 (GALACTIC‐HF) trial. Here we describe the baseline characteristics of participants in GALACTIC‐HF and how these compare with other contemporary trials. Methods and Results: Adults with established HFrEF, New York Heart Association functional class (NYHA) ≥ II, EF ≤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 (pharmacokinetic‐guided dosing: 25, 37.5 or 50 mg bid). 8256 patients [male (79%), non‐white (22%), mean age 65 years] were enrolled with a mean EF 27%, ischemic etiology in 54%, NYHA II 53% and III/IV 47%, and median NT‐proBNP 1971 pg/mL. HF therapies at baseline were among the most effectively employed in contemporary HF trials. GALACTIC‐HF 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 pressure < 100 mmHg (n = 1127), estimated glomerular filtration rate < 30 mL/min/1.73 m2 (n = 528), and treated with sacubitril‐valsartan at baseline (n = 1594). Conclusions: GALACTIC‐HF enrolled a well‐treated, high‐risk 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 “Monitoring & Control” 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 manufacturers’ 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 “Monitoring & Control” 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 manufacturers’ 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