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A Low-Power Analog Adder and Driver Using a-IGZO TFTs
Get PDFThis paper presents a novel low-power analog circuit, with n-type IGZO TFTs that can function as an adder operator or be designed to operate as a driver. Experiments were set to show summation of up to four signals. However, the design can easily be expanded to add higher number of signals, by appending a single TFT at the input per each additional signal. The circuit is simple, uses a single power supply irrespective to the number of input voltage signals, and shows good accuracy over a reasonable range of input values. By choosing proper TFT dimensions, the topology can replace the typical output drivers of TFT amplifiers, namely the common-drain with current source biasing, or the common-source with diode connected load. The circuit was fabricated with a temperature that does not exceeds 200 degrees C. Its performance is characterized from measurements at room temperature and normal ambient, with a power supply voltage of 12 V and a load of approximate to 4 pF. The proposed circuit has shown a linearity error less than 3.2% (up to an input signal peak-to-peak value of 2 V), a power consumption of 78 mu W and a bandwidth of approximate to 115 kHz, under worst case condition (when it is adding four signals with the same frequency). It has shown superior performance in terms of linearity when compared to the typical drivers considered in this study. In addition, it has shown almost the same behavior when measurements were repeated after one year. Therefore, the proposed circuit is a robust viable alternative to conventional approaches, being more compact, and contributes to increase the functionality of large-area flexible electronics
Generation of Customized Accelerators for Loop Pipelining of Binary Instruction Traces
No full textMany embedded applications process large amounts of data using regular computational kernels, amenable to acceleration by specialized hardware coprocessors. To reduce the significant design effort, the dedicated hardware may be automatically generated, usually starting from the application's source or binary code. This paper presents a moduloscheduled loop accelerator capable of executing multiple loops and a supporting toolchain. A generation/scheduling procedure, which fully relies on MicroBlaze instruction traces, produces accelerator instances, customized in terms of functional units and interconnections. The accelerators support integer and single-precision floating-point arithmetic, and exploit instruction-level parallelism, loop pipelining, and memory access parallelism via two read/write ports. A complete implementation of the proposed architecture is evaluated in a Virtex-7 device. Augmenting a MicroBlaze processor with a tailored accelerator achieves a geometric mean speedup, over software-only execution, of 6.61x for 13 floating-point kernels from the Livermore Loops set, and of 4.08x for 11 integer kernels from Texas Instruments' IMGLIB. The proposed customized accelerators are compared with ALU-based ones. The average specialized accelerator requires only 0.47x the number of field-programmable gate array slices of an accelerator with four ALUs. A geometric mean speedup of 1.78x over a four-issue very long instruction word (without floating-point support) was obtained for the integer kernels
Modified Chaos Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Optimized Operation Model for Stand-Alone CCHP Microgrid
No full textThe optimized dispatch of different distributed generations (DGs) in stand-alone microgrid (MG) is of great significance to the operation's reliability and economy, especially for energy crisis and environmental pollution. Based on controllable load (CL) and combined cooling-heating-power (CCHP) model of micro-gas turbine (MT), a multi-objective optimization model with relevant constraints to optimize the generation cost, load cut compensation and environmental benefit is proposed in this paper. The MG studied in this paper consists of photovoltaic (PV), wind turbine (WT), fuel cell (FC), diesel engine (DE), MT and energy storage (ES). Four typical scenarios were designed according to different day types (work day or weekend) and weather conditions (sunny or rainy) in view of the uncertainty of renewable energy in variable situations and load fluctuation. A modified dispatch strategy for CCHP is presented to further improve the operation economy without reducing the consumers' comfort feeling. Chaotic optimization and elite retention strategy are introduced into basic particle swarm optimization (PSO) to propose modified chaos particle swarm optimization (MCPSO) whose search capability and convergence speed are improved greatly. Simulation results validate the correctness of the proposed model and the effectiveness of MCPSO algorithm in the optimized operation application of stand-alone MG
Extending the Applicability of Graphlets to Directed Networks
Get PDFWith recent advances in high-throughput cell biology, the amount of cellular biological data has grown drastically. Such data is often modeled as graphs (also called networks) and studying them can lead to new insights intomolecule-level organization. A possible way to understand their structure is by analyzing the smaller components that constitute them, namely network motifs and graphlets. Graphlets are particularly well suited to compare networks and to assess their level of similarity due to the rich topological information that they offer but are almost always used as small undirected graphs of up to five nodes, thus limiting their applicability in directed networks. However, a large set of interesting biological networks such asmetabolic, cell signaling, or transcriptional regulatory networks are intrinsically directional, and using metrics that ignore edge direction may gravely hinder information extraction. Our main purpose in this work is to extend the applicability of graphlets to directed networks by considering their edge direction, thus providing a powerful basis for the analysis of directed biological networks. We tested our approach on two network sets, one composed of synthetic graphs and another of real directed biological networks, and verified that they were more accurately grouped using directed graphlets than undirected graphlets. It is also evident that directed graphlets offer substantially more topological information than simple graph metrics such as degree distribution or reciprocity. However, enumerating graphlets in large networks is a computationally demanding task. Our implementation addresses this concern by using a state-of-the-art data structure, the g-trie, which is able to greatly reduce the necessary computation. We compared our tool to other state-of-the art methods and verified that it is the fastest general tool for graphlet counting
A MATLAB subset to C compiler targeting embedded systems
Get PDFThis paper describes MATISSE, a compiler able to translate a MATLAB subset to C targeting embedded systems. MATISSE uses LARA, an aspect-oriented programming language, to specify additional information and transformations to the input MATLAB code, for example, insertion of code for initialization of variables, and specification of types and shapes of variables. The compiler is being developed bearing in mind flexibility, multitarget and multitoolchain support, allowing for the generation of several implementations in C from the same reference code in MATLAB. In this paper, we also present a number of techniques being employed in MATLAB to C compilation, such as element-wise mapping operations, matrix views, weak types, and intrinsics. We validate these techniques using MATISSE and a set of representative benchmarks. More specifically, we evaluate the compiler with a set of 31 benchmarks using an embedded system board and a desktop computer. The results show speedups up to 1.8x by employing information provided by LARA aspects, when compared with C code generated without additional user information. When compared with the execution time of the original code running on MATLAB, the execution time of the generated C code achieved a geometric mean speedup of 13x. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Integrated versus hierarchical approach to aggregate production planning and master production scheduling
No full textThe hierarchical planning concept is commonly used for production planning. Dividing the planning process into subprocesses which are solved separately in the order of the hierarchy decreases the complexity and fits the common organizational structure. However, interaction between planning levels is crucial to avoid infeasibility and inconsistency of plans. Furthermore, optimizing subproblems often leads to suboptimal results for the overall problem. The alternative, a monolithic model integrating all planning levels, has been rejected in the literature because of several reasons. In this study, we show that some of them do not hold for an integrated production planning model combining the planning tasks usually attributed to aggregate production planning and master production scheduling. Therefore, we develop a hierarchical and an integrated model considering both levels, aggregate production planning and master production scheduling. Computational tests show that it is possible to solve the integrated model and that it outperforms the hierarchical approach for all instances. Moreover, an indication is given why and when integration is beneficial
Phase-interrogated SPR sensing structures based on tapered and tip optrode optical fiber configurations with bimetallic layers
No full textThis work reports the theoretical investigation of optical fiber surface plasmon resonance sensors incorporating bimetallic layer combinations. Different metals like silver, gold, copper, and aluminum are considered to investigate the refractometric sensing properties of tapered and tip optrode phase-interrogated optical fiber plasmonic sensor structures. It is shown that the gold-silver combination, coupled to a tip optrode layout, is capable of maximizing the resolution and operation range of these sensing structures for environmental refractive index measurement
SPR optimization using metamaterials in a D-type PCF refractive index sensor
Get PDFUsing the finite element method (FEM), this paper presents a numerical investigation of the performance analysis of a D-type photonic crystal fiber (D-type PCF) for refractive index sensing, based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) with a planar structure made out of a metamaterial. COMSOL Multiphysics was used to evaluate the design of the referred refractive index optical fiber sensor, with higher accuracy and considerable economy of time and resources. A study of different metamaterials concentrations conformed by aluminum oxide (Al2O3) and silver (Ag) is carried out. Another structural parameters, which influences the refractive index sensor performance, the thickness of the metamaterial, is also investigated. The results indicate that the use of metamaterials provides a way of improving the performance of SPR sensors on optical fibers and allows to tailor the working parameters of the sensor
Tactical production and distribution planning with dependency issues on the production process
Get PDFTactical production-distribution "planning models have attracted a great deal of attention in the past decades. In these models, production and distribution decisions are considered simultaneously such that the combined plans are more advantageous than the plans resolved in a hierarchical planning process. We consider a two-stage production process, where in the first stage raw materials are transformed into continuous resources that feed the discrete production of end products in the second stage. Moreover, the setup times and costs of resources depend on the sequence in which they are processed in the first stage. The minimum scheduling unit is the product family which consists of products sharing common resources and manufacturing processes. Based on different mathematical modelling approaches to the production in the first stage, we develop a sequence-oriented formulation and a product-oriented formulation, and propose decomposition-based heuristics to solve this problem efficiently. By considering these dependencies arising in practical production processes, our model can be applied to various industrial cases, such as the beverage industry or the steel industry. Computation tests on instances from an industrial application are provided at the end of the paper