Performance analysis of a growable architecture for broad-bandpacket (ATM) switching

The performance of a growable architecture for broadband asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switching consisting of a memoryless self-routing interconnect fabric and modest-size packet switch modules is examined. The cell loss probability is the focus because the architecture attains the best possible delay-throughput performance if the packet switch modules use output queuing. There are two sources of cell loss in the switch. First, cells are dropped if too many simultaneous arrivals are destined to a group of output ports. Second, because a simple, distributed path-assignment controller is used for speed and efficiency, cells are dropped when the controller cannot schedule a path through the switch. The authors compute an upper bound on arrivals, possibly including isochronous circuit connections, and show that both sources of cell loss can be made negligibly small     

Complexity analysis of the Pawlak’s flowgraph extension for re-identification in multi-camera surveillance system

The idea of Pawlak’s flowgraph turned out to be a useful and convenient container for a knowledge of objects’ behaviour and movements within the area observed with a multi-camera surveillance system. Utilization of the flowgraph for modelling behaviour admittedly requires certain extensions and enhancements, but it allows for combining many rules into a one data structure and for obtaining parameters describing how objects tend to move through the supervised area. The main aim of this article is presentation of the complexity analysis of proposed modification of flowgraphs. This analysis contains considerations of issues such as memory efficiency and computational complexity of operations on the flowgraph. The measures related to space and time efficiency were also included.     

Electrical characterization of aluminium oxide-aluminium thin film composites by impedance spectroscopy

The impedance spectroscopy method has been used for diagnostics of the thin film sandwich structures containing two aluminium electrodes with the composite deposited between them. The aluminium oxide-aluminium composite was deposited in the high effective reactive pulsed magnetron sputtering process. The aim of the investigation was to obtain the metal-oxide composite layer in single magnetron sputtering process. The main purpose of presented research was to characterize the impedance of presented structure in the wide range of frequency. The electrical equivalent circuit of measured structures was described and led to the identification of the dielectric relaxation processes.     

Stable time step estimates for mesh‐free particle methods

Real‐time computational biomechanics for medicine usually uses explicit time integration, because of its efficiency and suitability for parallel implementation. Explicit time integration is only conditionally stable and therefore requires an estimation of the maximum stable time step that can be used. In this paper we develop a method of estimating the stable time step for mesh‐free particle methods for a specific case of mass lumping: the mass associated with an integration point is distributed equally to all nodes found in the support domain of that integration point. Two estimates of the stable time step for each integration point are developed: one that is very accurate but more costly to compute and one less accurate but easier to implement. The results are also valid for the FEM and beyond computational biomechanics for medicine. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceptually‐motivated Real‐time Temporal Upsampling of 3D Content for High‐refresh‐rate Displays

High‐refresh‐rate displays (e. g., 120 Hz) have recently become available on the consumer market and quickly gain on popularity. One of their aims is to reduce the perceived blur created by moving objects that are tracked by the human eye. However, an improvement is only achieved if the video stream is produced at the same high refresh rate (i. e. 120 Hz). Some devices, such as LCD TVs, solve this problem by converting low‐refresh‐rate content (i. e. 50 Hz PAL) into a higher temporal resolution (i. e. 200 Hz) based on two‐dimensional optical flow. In our approach, we will show how rendered three‐dimensional images produced by recent graphics hardware can be up‐sampled more efficiently resulting in higher quality at the same time. Our algorithm relies on several perceptual findings and preserves the naturalness of the original sequence. A psychophysical study validates our approach and illustrates that temporally up‐sampled video streams are preferred over the standard low‐rate input by the majority of users. We show that our solution improves task performance on high‐refresh‐rate displays.     

NEGF simulations of the effect of strain on scaled double gate nanoMOSFETs

The effect of biaxial strain on double gate (DG) nanoscaled Si MOSFET with channel lengths in the nanometre range is investigated using Non-Equilibrium Green’s Functions (NEGF) simulations. We have employed fully 2D NEGF simulations in order to answer the question at which body thickness the effects of strain is masked by the confinement impact. Following ITRS, we start with a 14 nm gate length DG MOSFET having a body thickness of 9 nm scaling the transistors to gate lengths of 10, 6 and 4 nm and body thicknesses of 6.1, 2.6 and 1.3 nm. The simulated I _D–V _G characteristics show a 6% improvement in the on-current for the 14 nm gate length transistor mainly due to the energy separation of the Δ valleys. The strain effect separates the 2 fold from the 4 fold valleys thus keeping mostly operational transverse electron effective mass in the transport direction. However, in the device with an extreme body thickness of 1.3 nm, the strain effect has no more impact on the DG performance because the strong confinement itself produces a large energy separation of valleys.     

Reconfigurable Printed Liquids

Liquids lack the spatial order required for advanced functionality. Interfacial assemblies of colloids, however, can be used to shape liquids into complex, 3D objects, simultaneously forming 2D layers with novel magnetic, plasmonic, or structural properties. Fully exploiting all‐liquid systems that are structured by their interfaces would create a new class of biomimetic, reconfigurable, and responsive materials. Here, printed constructs of water in oil are presented. Both form and function are given to the system by the assembly and jamming of nanoparticle surfactants, formed from the interfacial interaction of nanoparticles and amphiphilic polymers that bear complementary functional groups. These yield dissipative constructs that exhibit a compartmentalized response to chemical cues. Potential applications include biphasic reaction vessels, liquid electronics, novel media for the encapsulation of cells and active matter, and dynamic constructs that both alter, and are altered by, their external environment.