Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A charge pump system with new regulation and clocking scheme

A novel charge pump system with new regulation and clock generating techniques is proposed and verified in a 0.13 μm CMOS process. Rather than generating the reference voltage by band-gap reference (BGR) and the detected voltage by high voltage divider in the conventional regulation, both voltage reference and division of proposed pump system are implemented by single new circuit. Besides, the conventional oscillator for clock input of charge pump system is removed while an adaptive clock generation scheme is introduced to reduce the power consumption and shrink the system size. The experiment results show that the pump system can produce a stable and smooth output with a small ripple, and the high output accuracy is comparable to the conventional solution equipped with BGR. Moreover, the power consumption of the pump controlling is reduced by about 80% while the size of pump system is decreased by about 25%. Therefore, the proposed regulated charge pump (RCP) is very suitable for ultra-low power and high precision applications, for example, the embedded nonvolatile memories (eNVMs).
Characteristic-Mode-Based Design of Planar In-Band Full-Duplex Antennas

In-band full-duplex radios demand simultaneous transmit and receive (STAR) antennas with high isolation, compact and ultra-low profiles, and simple feed networks. Current state-of-the-art designs rarely meet all of these requirements at the same time. In this paper, we present a characteristic-mode-based design approach to achieve high isolation using compact fully-planar STAR antennas with a simple feed structure. The proposed method utilizes two characteristic modes of a conducting object as transmit and receive chains to achieve high isolation without a complicated self-interference cancellation circuit. The design example in this work is fully-planar, and it has a physical height of 1.6 mm. The measured −10 dB overlapped $|S_{11}| ~{\mathrm {and}}~ |S_{22}|$ fractional bandwidth of this STAR antenna is 2.5% and the measured isolation between the transmit and receive ports is greater than 30 dB over the entire frequency band of operation.
Patterning Titanium Dioxide Based Memristors Using Electron Beam Lithography

This paper reports a comprehensive study on the fabrication of titanium dioxide-based memristors, patterned using electron beam lithography method. Memristor, one of the state-of-the-art technology devices with non-volatile memory, has gained significant attention in recent years. The properties of the memristor, such as non-volatility, high speed, and low cost, allow it to simplify memory and storage hierarchy. Hence, they are ideal for performing bioinspired neural networks through their ability to combine memory and computation in one physical structure. For memristors to be used as an electronic component in various applications, it is necessary to go beyond laboratory research studies. Therefore, it is essential to develop the fabrication process so as to enable the mass production of these devices. In this context, various optimization studies were carried out primarily to provide that the structures of memristor successfully show memristive behavior during the fabrication process steps. Throughout the fabrication process, the bottom electrode, active layer, and top electrode of memristors were patterned by using electron beam lithography. In addition, the sputtering method is used for the deposition of electrodes, and the atomic layer deposition method is used for the active layer. Following the fabrication process, scanning electron microscopy is used to characterize the surface properties of the memristor structure. Current-voltage measurements were carried out to characterize the electrical behaviors of memristors and to test their endurance. As a result of measurements, the fabricated devices have shown memristive behavior successfully and good endurance for 1000 cycles.
Wavy Cantilever RF-MEMS Switch based on Bidirectional Control of Intrinsic Stress

This work reports on the design and modelling of wavy cantilever type series MEMS switches for RF applications. We demonstrate the self-assembly based on bi-directional control of intrinsic stresses in cantilever type MEMS switches to reshape the conventional straight cantilever beams into out-of-plane wavy structures. Wavy switch structures, as opposed to traditional cantilever switches, offer simultaneous optimization for RF-isolation and pull-in voltage. Various switch structures varying in geometry were designed and modelled using coupled multi-physics simulation tools which revealed high RF-isolation for proposed switch topologies without affecting the pull-in voltage values significantly. The novel switch designs reported herein achieve RF isolation and insertion loss values of greater than 25 dB and lower than 0.35 dB, respectively, with an actuation voltage of below 11 V for frequencies up to 40 GHz.
Self-Attention Based Visual-Tactile Fusion Learning for Predicting Grasp Outcomes

Predicting whether a particular grasp will succeed is critical to performing stable grasping and manipulating tasks. Robots need to combine vision and touch as humans do to accomplish this prediction. The primary problem to be solved in this process is how to learn effective visual-tactile fusion features. In this letter, we propose a novel Visual-Tactile Fusion learning method based on the Self-Attention mechanism (VTFSA) to address this problem. We compare the proposed method with the traditional methods on two public multimodal grasping datasets, and the experimental results show that the VTFSA model outperforms traditional methods by a margin of 5+% and 7+%. Furthermore, visualization analysis indicates that the VTFSA model can further capture some position-related visual-tactile fusion features that are beneficial to this task and is more robust than traditional methods.
Reconfigurable Stream-based Tensor Unit with Variable-Precision Posit Arithmetic

The increased adoption of DNN applications drove the emergence of dedicated tensor computing units to accelerate multi-dimensional matrix multiplication operations. Although they deploy highly efficient computing architectures, they often lack support for more general-purpose application domains. Such a limitation occurs both due to their consolidated computation scheme (restricted to matrix multiplication) and due to their frequent adoption of low-precision/custom floating-point formats (unsuited for general application domains). In contrast, this paper proposes a new Reconfigurable Tensor Unit (RTU) which deploys an array of variable-precision Vector MultiplyAccumulate (VMA) units. Furthermore, each VMA unit leverages the new Posit floating-point format and supports the full range of standardized posit precisions in a single SIMD unit, with variable vector-element width. Moreover, the proposed RTU explores the Posit format features for fused operations, together with spatial and time-multiplexing reconfiguration mechanisms to fuse and combine multiple VMAs to map high-level and complex operations. The RTU is also supported by an automatic data streaming infrastructure and a pipelined data movement scheme, allowing it to accelerate the computation of most data-parallel patterns commonly present in vectorizable applications. The proposed RTU showed to outperform state-of-the-art tensor and SIMD units, present in off-the-shelf platforms, in turn resulting in significant energy-efficiency improvements.
Time Domain Characteristic Mode Analysis for Transmission Problems

Characteristic mode analysis (CMA) is based on time-harmonic electromagnetics and applied mostly in frequency domain. In this paper, CMA is extended to time domain (TD) for transmission problems. Based on the modal self- and mutual-admittance of two-port systems, the modal TD response is obtained using inverse fast Fourier transform, extrapolation and Hilbert transform. TD-CMA represents modal impulse response on specified ports, and impulse response of the system is the linear superposition of the modal ones. Numerical examples are provided to explain this new concept. For a pair of parallel wires, the calculated TD-CMA is alike the common and differential modes. For a pair of dipoles, TD-CMA can be divided into strong and weak coupling modes according to their magnitudes. The strong coupling modes are due to the pulse radiation and oscillations at dipole tips and feedings. Time delay paths are clearly observed in the near field but are not discernable in the intermediate field. This shows different coupling mechanisms for the two cases. TD-CMA expands research field of CMA and may find applications for analyzing transient behaviors of microwave systems.
DP2 Block: An Improved Multi-Scale Block for Pulmonary Nodule Detection

Pulmonary nodule detection is a challenging problem in biomedical imaging. Most existing approaches exploit the multi-scale features at a layer level to detect nodule. However, the effect of features at a layer level is limited. This study proposes an improved architecture unit, which we term the 3D DP2 block. Just as its name implies, it is improved by the idea of the 3D dual-path network. It combines multiscale features not only in a layer-wise manner but also at a granular level, which means it can combine global features with local and increases the scales of receptive fields. Moreover, we adopt the coordination-guided convolutional layers (CoordConvs) and design a loss function inspired by the loss of Fast R-CNN. The proposed 3D DP2 block can be easily plugged into the backbone CNN architectures such as the U-Net model without additional parameters introduced while increasing the model accuracy. Our 3D DP2 block based on U-Net is validated on a public LUNA16 dataset. It improves the nodule detection accuracy compared with the baseline model. This demonstrates that pulmonary nodule detection can highly benefit from the multi-scale features at a granular level. And the proposed 3D DP2Net should be useful to other medical detection problems.
The effects of castration on the growth and meat quality of grazing cattle

Two experiments are described on the effects of bilateral castration, unilateral castration, and no castration on the growth and meat quality of grazing cattle. ln the first experiment 30 animals were allocated into entire male, unilateral castrate, and bilateral castrate groups and slaughtered at ten months old. There were significant differences in liveweight gain during certain periods, but at slaughter there were no significant differences in liveweight or carcase length. The full castrates had a significantly higher dressing percentage, heavier hindquarters, higher fat percentage, and lower muscle and bone percentage. Percentage dry matter, intramuscular fat, and tenderness were also higher in the full castrates. In the second experiment animals were allocated at ten weeks into unilateral castrate or bilateral castrate treatment groups. Four animals in each group were 22-24 months when slaughtered. The full castrates had significantly higher dressing percentage, lower percentage forequarter, and more tender and lighter coloured meat. It is concluded that, under the experimental conditions described, although there were significant differences in body composition and tenderness attributed to the endocrinal effects of full castration, there were no large differences in growth rate. Differences in conformation and meat quality were larger in older animals.
A Low-Power 1-V Supply Dynamic Comparator

This letter presents a low-power dynamic comparator for ultralow power applications. The prototype is designed in a 65-nm CMOS process with a supply voltage of 1 V and is compared against the widely used double tail latch comparator in terms of power consumption and input referred rms noise. The addition of cross-coupled devices to the input differential pair prevents the comparator internal nodes from fully discharging to ground in contrast to the conventional architecture. This reduces the power consumption while achieving similar noise levels. Measurements demonstrate that the proposed comparator achieves an input referred rms noise voltage of 220 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{V}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> against 210 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{V}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for the conventional comparator with a 30% reduction in power. The proposed circuit consumes 0.19-pJ energy per comparison.
PredCom: A Predictive Approach to Collecting Approximated Communication Traces

Communication traces collected from MPI applications are an important source of information for performance optimization as they can help analysts determine communication patterns and identify inefficiencies. However, their collection, especially at scale, is time consuming, since it usually requires running the complete target application on a large number of nodes. In this work, we present PredCom, a tool-chain to generate a predictive communication proxy based on information gathered from a few small scale runs, which allows us to extract approximate communication traces with an accuracy high enough for most analysis goals. For this, we combine LLVM passes on the original source code (to capture static program structure) with parameter prediction (to capture dynamic and scaling behavior). This approach drastically reduces the time needed for collecting the communication traces, even for traces on large numbers of MPI processes. We demonstrate that PredCom generates communication traces of various applications up to 1612x faster with an accuracy loss of 0.11 on average compared to the original large-scale traces, and we show that the generated traces can be used to optimize process placement.
Paper Citation Count Prediction Based on Recurrent Neural Network with Gated Recurrent Unit

In recent years, with the increasing investment in scientific research, the number of papers has proliferated, and the development of scientific research has also received widespread attention from scholars. Paper citations as an indicator to measure academic influence have essential reference value for future research directions. Aiming at the future paper citation number prediction problem, we propose a citation number prediction model based on the recurrent neural network method with gated recurrent unit(GRU-CPM). In this paper, we first extract features from real data sets that are useful for predicting the number of citations in papers, and then the features were input into GRU-CPM for prediction. Finally, the prediction results are compared with other regression models. Experimental results demonstrate that the GRU-CPM has higher prediction accuracy and faster convergence speed. The time series prediction of citation count is better than existing methods.
Simulation-Based Analysis of Thermo-Mechanical Constraints in Packages for Diamond Power Devices

Diamond is one of the best wide band-gap semiconductor materials available for high power devices development in terms of high current capability, high temperature operability, breakdown voltage and switching speed. Unfortunately, fabrication technology for diamond devices is still experimental and immature. Furthermore, one of the most critical fields to be addressed for practical diamond devices implementation concerns the development of power packaging solutions, given that limitations in the device packaging would hinder the performance of the device and act as the limiting factor for a technology that is still in a development state. Of special interest are the induced stresses and deformations caused by the thermo-mechanical mismatch between materials. These stresses and strains will be considerably different than the ones obtained with silicon or SiC dies, and it will be especially noticeable in high temperature applications due to the higher temperature swings and the reliability constraints that arise from the coefficient of thermal expansion mismatch and stiffness difference. In this paper, a Finite Element Method for thermo-mechanical simulation of a high-temperature thermal cycle for a full-stacked diamond die SOT-227 power module is introduced and compared to silicon- and SiC-die modules. Special interest is addressed to the analysis of stress and deformations generated in the die and die-attach solder layer.
A 5V, 20MHz Bandwidth, fully differential Operational Amplifier with 70 V/μs Slew Rate and 205 ns/30 ns enable/disable time in 180 nm CMOS

When the enable-pin of an Opamp is used for modulation, or it is powered down due to power consumption considerations, the turn-on and turn-off time delay are critical [6]. Here we present a differential Opamp that works as differential amplifier. It uses adaptive biasing in common mode feedback circuit and power stages. It has a slewrate of 70 V/µs, an on-delay of 205 ns and an off-delay of 30 ns. To the best of our knowledge, the latter is the fastest ever published. It is fabricated in 180 nm CMOS with 1.04xl. 26mm chip area and draws 9mA out of 5V.
D-Decomposition Based Robust Discrete-Time Current Regulator for Grid-Connected VSI

The D-decomposition method allows to design control structures with prescribed locations of closed loop poles. Unlike the root locus method, D-decomposition natively handles two variable regulator parameters, which makes it suitable for more complex control structures. Moreover, an extension to more than two variable parameters is straightforward. In this paper, the advantages of the D-decomposition method are illustrated by synthesizing a robust low-order current regulator for a grid-connected voltage source inverter (VSI) with LCL filter. It is shown how to visualize the complete region in the low dimensional regulator parameter space satisfying certain robust performance criteria (with robust stability being a special case). The paper concludes by simulation results validating the robustness properties of the designed low-order regulator under substantial grid impedance variations.
Beyond the Shortest Route: A Survey on Quality-Aware Route Navigation for Pedestrians

Navigation systems often aid users when traveling in unfamiliar locations. Current navigation systems tend to focus on identifying the shortest or fastest routes between two points. However, path cost expressed in terms of length and distance (i.e., the utilitarian qualities of travel) is only one attribute which could be used in route recommendation. Recent years have seen navigation systems moving beyond such utilitarian attributes. These include systems aimed at providing users with scenic, safe or attractive routes among other dimensions. In this paper, we contribute to the existing research domain by providing an overview of the different quality-aware route navigation systems that have been proposed in past research for pedestrians. In particular, we examine the different qualities which have been used as key criteria in route recommendation. As the outcome of the paper, we provide a categorization of these systems based on our proposed SWEEP taxonomy. In addition, we outline the various data sources, algorithms and evaluation approaches that have been used to implement quality-aware route navigation systems. Afterwards, we conclude by discussing potential problems encountered in previous studies and highlight promising directions for future research.
Technical solutions for integrated trading on spot, futures and bonds stock markets

This article is an extended version of a paper presented in the WSEAS MCBE09 conference [10] in which we will present in more detail practical solution for building an integration tier between an online trading platform and two stock exchange markets, in a SOA like architecture. Our solution is constructed using XML, Java and PL/SQL and not third-party costly solutions. This open source approach, even if it is more difficult to develop and implement at first, helps a company to control the solution. The system will not be tied to SOA vendors that are usually keeping their software as secret as possible, demanding that they will develop, an additional costs, all the future developments. We are using XML for communication, not only because of the constraints given by the systems we integrate, but also because it is the natural choice in a SOA like solution. XML it's being used to enable web services and similar, often custom, RPC functionality to allow greater access to data across multiple systems within an organization and allowing the possibility of future systems to be created from collections of such RPC functionality [5, 6].
A Secured Framework for SDN-Based Edge Computing in IoT-Enabled Healthcare System

The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of resource-constrained smart devices capable to sense and process data. It connects a huge number of smart sensing devices, i.e., things, and heterogeneous networks. The IoT is incorporated into different applications, such as smart health, smart home, smart grid, etc. The concept of smart healthcare has emerged in different countries, where pilot projects of healthcare facilities are analyzed. In IoT-enabled healthcare systems, the security of IoT devices and associated data is very important, whereas Edge computing is a promising architecture that solves their computational and processing problems. Edge computing is economical and has the potential to provide low latency data services by improving the communication and computation speed of IoT devices in a healthcare system. In Edge-based IoT-enabled healthcare systems, load balancing, network optimization, and efficient resource utilization are accurately performed using artificial intelligence (AI), i.e., intelligent software-defined network (SDN) controller. SDN-based Edge computing is helpful in the efficient utilization of limited resources of IoT devices. However, these low powered devices and associated data (private sensitive data of patients) are prone to various security threats. Therefore, in this paper, we design a secure framework for SDN-based Edge computing in IoT-enabled healthcare system. In the proposed framework, the IoT devices are authenticated by the Edge servers using a lightweight authentication scheme. After authentication, these devices collect data from the patients and send them to the Edge servers for storage, processing, and analyses. The Edge servers are connected with an SDN controller, which performs load balancing, network optimization, and efficient resource utilization in the healthcare system. The proposed framework is evaluated using computer-based simulations. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework provides better solutions for IoT-enabled healthcare systems.
Teaching Digitalization and Systems Modeling for Virtual Commissioning Using Virtual Labs

The new seminar “Digital Twins for Virtual Commissioning of Production Machines” follows a technical approach that uses virtualization and offers the possibility to pursue an uncommon teaching method called problem-based learning (PBL). The seminar is divided into two parts, with fundamental theoretical knowledge in automation technology and systems modeling provided first. In the second part, the students use the dedicated software environment to edit projects on their own, and at this point the PBL approach is used. This method enables students to self-organize their learning process and take an active part in the seminar. The idea for the seminar and virtual teaching lab evolved from the industrial use case of testing software for programmable logic controllers (PLCs) without the real machine, using virtual commissioning (VC). The primary effort of VC lies in the manual creation of a digital representation of each mechatronic component providing the same behavior seen from PLC perspective. Students are taught to do this, create the so-called digital twin (DT).