Addressing packaging challenges

To meet the emerging near-term and long-term packaging challenges, the electronics industry must begin to increase spending on packaging research and technology development. In the short-term the industry shift to manufacturing outsourcing (combined with decreased profitability in many electronics sectors) has driven a decrease in packaging research. The market forces will correct this trend as the impact of increasing package cost and the limits of packaging technology start to constrain industry growth. However, a short-term gap will develop in broad-based industry packaging capability for emerging technologies and new applications. This gap will create an opportunity for significant competitive advantage through packaging for those companies that increase their focus on packaging development today.     

Universal personal communications: Emergence of a paradigm shift in the communications industry

It is postulated that today we are in the midst of a major paradigm shift in the communications industry. The essence of this paradigm shift is a transition from today's universal telephone service which has been perfected over the past 100 years, to a future communication service environment, referred to as universal personal communication. Under this new paradigm, communications will be person based in contrast to the predominantly location-based communication environment of today. Societal trends, evolving global standards for communication, regulatory policies, and emergent technologies are seen as the forces driving such a transition. Universal personal communications will be characterized by flexible access to universal services permittingmore enduser control which will result in personalization and customization of such services. Furthermore, the centralized intelligence focus of today's communication networks needs to evolve toward a focus where network intelligence can be migrated to the periphery of the core transport network. The viability of universal personal communication will be critically dependent upon how well it addresses the end customer value proposition. Two key elements of this proposition are transparency of mobility and personalization of service environments. A zonal service environment model which classifies and characterizes these various service environments in terms of common communication parameters is proposed. This model is built around hierarchical structures for both cellular and digital wireless transmission, and can be viewed as critical towards the realization of transparent mobility management and personalization of services.     

Vehicular communication systems: enabling technologies, applications, and future outlook on intelligent transportation

Numerous technologies have been deployed to assist and manage transportation. But recent concerted efforts in academia and industry point to a paradigm shift in intelligent transportation systems. Vehicles will carry computing and communication platforms, and will have enhanced sensing capabilities. They will enable new versatile systems that enhance transportation safety and efficiency and will provide infotainment. This article surveys the state-of-the-art approaches, solutions, and technologies across a broad range of projects for vehicular communication systems.     

量子元胞自动机共面五输入择多门结构的分析与设计

量子元胞自动机（Quantum-dot Cellular Automata,QCA）是一种具有新型计算范式的纳米器件,它是未来有望替代传统CMOS器件的有力竞争者之一.本文首先从QCA器件的功耗角度出发,对影响半径为41nm的QCA共面系统中元胞的耦合度进行建模,根据元胞之间的位置关系构造QCA门结构模型,据此对现有的共面五输入择多门进行分类,通过性能分析总结其结构特点,以此设计出一个新的低功耗五输入择多门,测试结果表明该结构功耗最低且其他性能也相对较优.另外,为验证所提出五输入择多门在电路中的性能,本文选择MR Azghadi全加器设计了一款共面QCA全加器,与同类加法器相比性能也最优.     

Magneto-Mechanical Metamaterials with Widely Tunable Mechanical Properties and Acoustic Bandgaps

Mechanical metamaterials are architected manmade materials that allow for unique behaviors not observed in nature, making them promising candidates for a wide range of applications. Existing metamaterials lack tunability as their properties can only be changed to a limited extent after the fabrication. Herein, a new magneto-mechanical metamaterial is presented that allows great tunability through a novel concept of deformation mode branching. The architecture of this new metamaterial employs an asymmetric joint design using hard-magnetic soft active materials that permits two distinct actuation modes (bending and folding) under opposite-direction magnetic fields. The subsequent application of mechanical compression leads to the deformation mode branching where the metamaterial architecture transforms into two distinctly different shapes, which exhibit very different deformations and enable great tunability in properties such as mechanical stiffness and acoustic bandgaps. Furthermore, this metamaterial design can be incorporated with magnetic shape memory polymers with global stiffness tunability, which also allows for the global shift of the acoustic behaviors. The combination of magnetic and mechanical actuations, as well as shape memory effects, impart wide tunable properties to a new paradigm of metamaterials.     

Cloud Computing: Concept, Model, and Key Technologies

Cloud computing is a new network computing paradigm based on IP architecture, and its potential lies in new ICT business applications. For the majority of operators and enterprises, the main task associated with cloud computing is next generation data center transformation. This will ensure cloud computing becomes more widespread among enterprises, institutions, organizations, and operators. Cloud computing not only provides traditional IT resource usage and application services, but also supports full resource usage and application services such as IT, communications, video, mobile, and Internet of Things using a converged network infrastructure. Key cloud computing technologies include unified fabric, unified virtualization, and unified computing system. The formation of an open industry alliance and promotion of open technology standards will be critical for the future development of cloud computing.     

Modeap: Moving Desktop Application to Mobile Cloud Service

Thanks to the availability of various mobile applications, lots of users shift from desktop environments, e.g., PCs and laptops, to mobile devices, e.g., smartphones and tablets. However, there are still some desktop applications without counterparts on mobile devices, such as some integrated development environments (e.g., eclipse) and automatic industry control systems. In this paper, we propose Modeap, a platform-independent mobile cloud service that can push all desktop applications developed for various operating systems from cloud servers to mobile devices. Modeap follows a design principle of complete detachment and regeneration of desktop user interface, i.e., the essential graphical primitives of the original desktop applications will be intercepted and then translated into standard web-based graphical primitives such that the interactions between users and remote cloud applications become possible via mobile web browsers. In this way, all desktop applications built upon the same set of graphical primitives can be used on mobile devices in great flexibility without installing any new software. We have developed a proof-of-concept prototype that provides Windows applications from cloud server to mobile web browsers. The results of extensive experiments show that the proposed framework can achieve our design goals with low latency and bandwidth consumption.     

Digital signal processing

Markets have always influenced the central thrust of the semiconductor industry. Beginning in the early eighties, the personal computer (PC) market has been the dominant market influencing the semiconductor industry. Single-chip microprocessors (MPUs) enabled what became the huge PC market, which ultimately overshadowed the earlier minicomputer and mainframe computer markets. The popularity of PCs led to investments in increasingly more powerful MPUs and memory chips of ever-growing capacity. MPUs and DRAMs became the semiconductor industry technology drivers for the data processing needs of the PC. But now, DSP, as opposed to conventional data processing, has become the major technology driver for the semiconductor industry as evidenced by its market growth and the fervour of chip vendors to provide new products based on DSP technology. The increasing need to digitally process analog information signals, like audio and video, is causing a major shift in the semiconductor business. Since DSP is the mathematical manipulation of those digitized information signals, specialized math circuitry is required for efficient signal processing-circuitry that was previously confined to classical DSP chips     

An ultra low-voltage low power PSK backscatter modulator for passive UHF RFID tags compatible with C1 G2 EPC standard protocol

Reducing the power consumption of a passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tag is the key in many applications. As the modulator is usually the most power-hungry block in an RFID tag, this paper proposes a power-saving modulator. The proposed modulator uses phase shift keying (PSK) backscatter modulation which allows tag to communicate data from its memory to a reader by PSK modulation. The proposed modulator uses a MOSCAP as a variable impedance and is designed in a new one-inverter structure in compare to the conventional varactor-based modulators designed in two-inverter structure, as this modulator needs just a low voltage swing to drive its MOSCAP. Using MOSCAP as the variable capacitance leads to a low voltage design. Also, the fundamental equations required for determination of the capacitive impedance seen by the antenna is presented. This impedance is the master key in modulator design. The modulator has been designed, simulated and optimized in 0.18 μm CMOS technology. All possible simulation results are presented to approve its compatible operation with C1 G2 EPC global standard. The power consumption of less than 46 nW is achieved in all process corner cases at 0.8 V power supply.     

Home automation

The impact of home automation on domestic lifestyles will be as far ranging as was that of factory automation on industry and its benefits will be available to all sectors of society. Home automation will be achieved not with the household robot but with embedded computing power and memory within dozens of pieces of domestic equipment, each of which will communicate with the user and with other equipments. Within the integrated home system the communication media will include infra-red, radio, mains wires, installed twisted wires and coaxial cable, and later perhaps optical fibre. Applications will include security, lighting, heating, cooking, washing appliances, audio and video systems, energy management as well as a number of new applications such as health monitoring, home publishing etc. A large standards activity is in place by the major manufacturers of domestic equipment throughout Europe to ensure that their equipments are reliable and compatible     

An optimization based design for integrated dependable real-time embedded systems

Moving from the traditional federated design paradigm, integration of mixed-criticality software components onto common computing platforms is increasingly being adopted by automotive, avionics and the control industry. This method faces new challenges such as the integration of varied functionalities (dependability, responsiveness, power consumption, etc.) under platform resource constraints and the prevention of error propagation. Based on model driven architecture and platform based design’s principles, we present a systematic mapping process for such integration adhering a transformation based design methodology. Our aim is to convert/transform initial platform independent application specifications into post integration platform specific models. In this paper, a heuristic based resource allocation approach is depicted for the consolidated mapping of safety critical and non-safety critical applications onto a common computing platform meeting particularly dependability/fault-tolerance and real-time requirements. We develop a supporting tool suite for the proposed framework, where VIATRA (VIsual Automated model TRAnsformations) is used as a transformation tool at different design steps. We validate the process and provide experimental results to show the effectiveness, performance and robustness of the approach.     

一种应用于纳米工艺存储编译器的高效且精确例化功耗表征方法

随着芯片规模的不断增大,功耗成为影响纳米工艺芯片设计性能的主要因素。而在一个典型的千万门级规模SoC设计中,存储器的面积往往占到整个芯片面积的一半以上!因此,除了在实际的芯片设计中实现低功耗设计方法,一种高效准确的对静态和动态功耗的表征方法对于进行设计的功耗预估是非常重要的,尤其是对于便携式应用的芯片项目。在这篇论文中,我们在回顾传统功耗表征方法和其应用限制的同时,将阐述一种不仅可以解决当前功耗表征瓶颈而且具有高准确度的方法。为了达到高精度的设计要求,我们将纳入在纳米工艺下布图相关效应对器件和连线的寄生参数的影响。在文章中我们解释了这种方法的实现流程,并将一些实验结果分享提供读者参考。     

Thermally driven reliability issues in microelectronic systems: status-quo and challenges

To meet the needs of future microelectronics and microsystems, we need a paradigm shift in the approach to system reliability. It is emphasized that the scientific success of many nano/micro-related projects will never lead to a business success without breakthroughs in the way industry is handling quality and reliability through the whole value chain. The paper discusses several reasons for these facts and offers a perspective for future improvements. The paper is essentially a mix between an overview paper and some personal observations in an editorial style.     

Making use of semiconductor manufacturing process variations: FinFET-based physical unclonable functions for efficient security integration in the IoT

In a typical design environment, semiconductor manufacturing variations are considered as challenges for nanoelectronic circuit design engineers. This has led to multi-front research on process variations analysis and its mitigations. As a paradigm shift of that trend the present article explores the use of semiconductor manufacturing variations for enhancing security of systems using FinFET technology as an example. FinFETs were introduced to replace high-\(\kappa \) transistors in nanoelectronic applications. From microprocessors to graphic processing units, FinFETs are being used commercially today. Along with the technological advancements in computing and networking, the number of cyber attacks has also increased. Simultaneously, numerous implementations of the Internet of Things are already present. In this environment, one small security flaw is enough to place the entire network in danger. Encrypting communications in such an environment is vital. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) can be used to encrypt device to device communications and are the main focus of this paper. PUFs are hardware primitives which rely on semiconductor manufacturing variations to generate characteristics which are used for this purpose. Two different designs of a ring oscillator PUF are introduced, one with low power consumption trading off device performance and one high-performance trading off device power consumption. There is an 11% decrease in power consumption with the low power model along with a simple design and fabrication. Performance of the device can be increased with almost no increase in power consumption.     

Analysis of leakage currents and impact on off-state powerconsumption for CMOS technology in the 100-nm regime

Off-state leakage currents have been investigated for sub-100 nm CMOS technology. The two leakage mechanisms investigated in this work include conventional off-state leakage due to short channel effects and gate leakage through ultrathin gate oxides. The conventional off-state leakage due to short channel effects exhibited the similar characteristics as previously published; however, gate leakage introduces two significant consequences with respect to off-state power consumption: (1) an increase in the number of transistors contributing to the total off-state power consumption of the chip and (2) an increase in the conventional off-state current due to gate leakage near the drain region of the device. Using experimentally measured data, it is estimated that gate leakage does not exceed the off-state specifications of the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors for gate oxides as thin as 1.4 to 1.5 nm for high performance CMOS. Low power and memory applications may be limited to an oxide thickness of 1.8 to 2.0 nm in order to minimize the off-state power consumption and maintain an acceptable level of charge retention. The analysis in this work suggests that reliability will probably limit silicon oxide scaling for high performance applications whereas gate leakage will limit gate oxide scaling for low power and memory applications     

Nanoscale CMOS

This paper examines the apparent limits, possible extensions, and applications of CMOS technology in the nanometer regime. Starting from device scaling theory and current industry projections, we analyze the achievable performance and possible limits of CMOS technology from the point of view of device physics, device technology, and power consumption. Various possible extensions to the basic logic and memory devices are reviewed, with emphasis on novel devices that are structurally distinct front conventional bulk CMOS logic and memory devices. Possible applications of nanoscale CMOS are examined, with a view to better defining the likely capabilities of future microelectronic systems. This analysis covers both data processing applications and nondata processing applications such as RF and imaging. Finally, we speculate on the future of CMOS for the coming 15-20 years     

Low-Power Limited-Search Parallel State Viterbi Decoder Implementation Based on Scarce State Transition

In this paper, a low-power Viterbi decoder design based on scarce state transition (SST) is presented. A low complexity algorithm based on a limited search algorithm, which reduces the average number of the add-compare-select computation of the Viterbi algorithm, is proposed and seamlessly integrated with the SST-based decoder. The new decoding scheme has low overhead and facilitates low-power implementation for high throughput applications. We also propose an uneven-partitioned memory architecture for the trace-back survivor memory unit to reduce the overall memory access power. The new Viterbi decoder is designed and implemented in TSMC 0.18-mum CMOS process. Simulation results show that power consumption is reduced by up to 80% for high throughput wireless systems such as Multiband-OFDM Ultra-wideband applications.     

车载AdHoc网络

车载自组织网络（VANET）作为移动自组织网络（MANET）的特殊子类,因其在智能交通和车载娱乐方面的广阔应用前景,目前受到业界的普遍关注。VANET的主要特点是车辆高速行驶、信道快速衰落、多普勒效应严重、网络拓扑变化快,由此将带来许多传输和组网的问题。     

Private computing on public platforms: portable application security

As cellular telephones and high capacity memory sticks emerge as users' primary repository for data and applications, users will often run applications and display data on remote hosts. The biggest challenge in supporting this mobile data, mobile applications, stationary platform model is ensuring the security and privacy of user applications and data during execution on the remote platforms. Private computing on public platforms (PCPP) is a new application security approach which isolates applications to allow for secure and private execution on third party systems. This paper introduces PCPP and details its five basic building blocks which together ensure that the PCPP protected application's executable code, context, and data remain unaltered, unmonitored, and unrecorded before, during, and after exposure to the remote platform. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Energy awareness workflow model for wireless sensor nodes

Before the development of a large‐scale wireless sensor network (WSN) infrastructure, it is necessary to create a model to evaluate the lifespan of the infrastructure, the system performance and the cost so that the best design solution can be obtained. Energy consumption is an important factor that influences the lifespan of WSNs. One of the ways to extend the lifespan of WSNs is to design wireless sensor nodes with low power consumption. This involves component selection and the optimisation of hardware architecture, monitoring software system and protocols to satisfy the requirements of the particular applications. This paper proposes a comprehensive model to describe the workflow of a wireless sensor node. Parameter setup and energy consumption calculation are demonstrated through the model simulation. It provides a mathematical approach to dynamically evaluate the energy consumption of a sensor node. This will benefit the development of wireless sensor nodes based on microprocessors with limited computational capability. Therefore, the model can be applied in dynamic power management systems for wireless sensor nodes or in wireless communication protocols with energy awareness, in particular, for WSNs with self‐organisation. More importantly, the generalisation of the model may be employed as a standard paradigm for the development of wireless sensor node with energy awareness. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.