Short-circuit power driven gate sizing technique for reducing powerdissipation

One major challenge in low-power technology is how to reduce overall power dissipation of a given subsystem without impacting its performance. In this paper we present a technique that can be applied to the nonspeed-critical nets in a circuit in order to reduce overall power dissipation. This technique involves a study of short-circuit power dissipation as a function of input signal slews and output load conditions, to aid in making a judicious choice of drive strengths for various gates in a circuit. The resulting low-power solution does not degrade the original performance and yields a circuit which occupies less silicon area. The technique described here can be incorporated into any power optimization or synthesis tool. Lastly, we present the savings in power and area for a 32-b carry lookahead adder which was designed using the technique described here     

Pervaporation of organic compounds from aqueous mixtures using polydimethylsiloxane‐containing block copolymer membranes

Pervaporation of aqueous mixtures of ethanol, acetone, butanol, isobutanol, and furfural through polystyrene‐b‐polydimethylsiloxane‐b‐polystyrene (SDS) triblock copolymer membranes is reported. These mixtures are important for biofuel production from lignocellulosic feedstocks. Feedstock depolymerization results in the formation of furfural which must be removed before fermentation. Ethanol, butanol, isobutanol, and acetone are important fermentation biofuels. The membrane selectivity of SDS is about unity over a wide range of concentrations of aqueous ethanol mixtures, similar to the membrane selectivity of crosslinked polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The permeabilities of butanol, isobutanol, and furfural are larger than those of ethanol and acetone. The volatile organic compound permeability through SDS is similar to or higher than that through PDMS across a broad range of temperatures and feed concentrations is found. More selective and permeable membranes are needed to lower the cost of biofuel purification. The SDS membranes developed are but one step toward improved membranes. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 61: 2789–2794, 2015     

High-performance energy-efficient D-flip-flop circuits

This paper investigates performance, power, and energy efficiency of several CMOS master-slave D-flip-flops (DFF's). To improve performance and energy efficiency, a push-pull DFF and a push-pull isolation DFF are proposed. Among the five DFF's compared, the proposed push-pull isolation circuit is found to be the fastest with the best energy efficiency. Effects of using a double-pass-transistor logic (DPL) circuit and tri-state push-pull driver are also studied. Last, metastability characteristics of the five DFP's are also analyzed     

Characterization of unconventional MYO6, the human homologue of the gene responsible for deafness in Snell's waltzer mice

Deafness is the most common form of sensory impairment in humans. Mutations in unconventional myosins have been found to cause deafness in humans and mice. The mouse recessive deafness mutation, Snell's waltzer, contains an intragenic deletion in an unconventional myosin, myosin VI (locus designation, Myo6). The requirement for Myo6 for proper hearing in mice makes this gene an excellent candidate for a human deafness disorder. Here we report the cloning and characterization of the human unconventional myosin VI (locus designation, MYO6) cDNA. The MYO6 gene maps to human chromosome 6q13. The isolation of the human gene makes it now possible to determine if mutations in MYO6 contribute to the pathogenesis of deafness in the human population.     

High performance low power array multiplier using temporal tiling

Digital multipliers are a major source power dissipation in digital signal processors. Array architecture is a popular technique to implement these multipliers due to its regular compact structure. High power dissipation in these structures is mainly due to the switching of a large number of gates during multiplication. In addition, much power is also dissipated due to a large number of spurious transitions on internal nodes. Timing analysis of a full adder, which is a basic building block in array multipliers, has resulted in a different array connection pattern that reduces power dissipation due to the spurious transition activity. Furthermore, this connection pattern also improves the multiplier throughput. This array pattern is based on creating a compact tiled structure, wherein the shape of a tile represents the delay through that tile. That is, a compact structure created using these tiles is nothing but a structure with high throughput. Such a temporal tiling technique can also be applied to other digital circuits. Based on our simulation studies, a temporally tiled array multiplier achieves 50% and 35% improvements in delay and power dissipation compared to a conventional array multiplier. Improvement in delay can be traded for power using voltage reduction techniques     

Direct frequency modulation of an ADPLL for bluetooth/GSM with injection pulling elimination

We propose and demonstrate a Gaussian frequency-shift keying and Gaussian minimum-shift keying (GMSK) pulse-shape filtering for wireless RF transmitters with an arbitrary reference frequency. The filter is software controlled to work in a multistandard radio. Spurs, which are due to the frequency injection pulling, in cases when the reference harmonics are close enough to the oscillating frequency, are avoided by means of retiming the reference clock by the RF oscillator. Baseband clock for the pulse-shape filtering is derived through a simple fractional-N division of the reference frequency. This saves area and power since it is no longer required to create a low-jitter clock for baseband symbol generation and modulating data. It is especially advantageous when the available reference frequency is not an integer multiple of the symbol rate. The presented transmitter is realized without any explicit analog filtering and is part of a commercial single-chip fully compliant Bluetooth radio fabricated in a digital 130-nm CMOS process. We demonstrate the software programming capability through an experimental GMSK modulation for the global system for mobile communication.     

Low-power design techniques for high-performance CMOS adders

A high-performance adder is one of the most critical components of a processor which determines its throughput, as it is used in the ALU, the floating-point unit, and for address generation in case of cache or memory access. In this paper, low-power design techniques for various digital circuit families are studied for implementing high-performance adders, with the objective to optimize performance per watt or energy efficiency as well as silicon area efficiency. While the investigation is done using 100 MHz, 32 b carry lookahead (CLA) adders in a 0.6 μm CMOS technology, most techniques presented here can also be applied to other parallel adder algorithms such as carry-select adders (CSA) and other energy efficient CMOS circuits. Among the techniques presented here, the double pass-transistor logic (DPL) is found to be the most energy efficient while the single-rail domino and complementary pass-transistor logic (CPL) result in the best performance and the most area efficient adders, respectively. The impact of transistor threshold voltage scaling on energy efficiency is also examined when the supply voltage is scaled from 3.5 V down to 1.0 V     

Multi-physics modeling of doxorubicine binding to ion-exchange resin in blood filtration devices

A group of drugs used in intra-arterial chemotherapy (IAC) have intrinsic ionic properties, which can be used for filtering excessive drugs from blood in order to reduce systemic toxicity. The ion-exchange mechanism is utilized in an endovascular Chemofilter device which can be deployed during the IAC for capturing ionic drugs after they have had their effect on the tumor. In this study, the concentrated solution theory is used to account for the effect of electrochemical forces on the drug transport and adsorption by introducing an effective diffusion coefficient in the advection–diffusion–reaction equation. Consequently, a multi-physics model coupling hemodynamic and electrochemical forces is developed and applied to simulations of the transport and binding of doxorubicine in the Chemofilter device. A comparison of drug adsorption predicted by the computations to that measured in animal studies demonstrated the benefits of using the concentrated solution theory over the Nernst–Plank relations for modeling drug binding.     

Minimization of focused ion beam damage in nanostructured polymer thin films

Focused ion beam (FIB) instruments have proven to be an invaluable tool for transmission electron microscopy (TEM) sample preparation. FIBs enable relatively easy and site-specific cross-sectioning of different classes of materials. However, damage mechanisms due to ion bombardment and possible beam heating effects in materials limit the usefulness of FIBs. Materials with adequate heat conductivity do not suffer from beam heating during FIB preparation, and artifacts in materials such as metals and ceramics are primarily limited to defect generation and Ga implantation. However, in materials such as polymers or biological structures, where heat conductivity is low, beam heating can also be a problem. In order to examine FIB damage in polymers we have undertaken a systematic study by exposing sections of a PS-b-PMMA block copolymer to the ion beam at varying beam currents and sample temperatures. The sections were then examined by TEM and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and analyzed using electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS). Our empirical results show beam heating in polymers due to FIB preparation can be limited by maintaining a low beam current (≤100 pA) during milling.