Controlled elements for designing ciphers suitable to efficient VLSI implementation

This work considers the problem of increasing the performance of the ciphers based on Data-Dependent (DD) operations (DDO) for VLSI implementations. New minimum size primitives are proposed to design DDOs. Using advanced DDOs instead of DD permutations (DDP) in the DDP-based iterative ciphers Cobra-H64 and Cobra-H128 the number of rounds has been significantly reduced yielding enhancement of the “performance per cost” value and retaining security at the level of indistinguishability from a random transformation. To obtain further enhancement of this parameter a new crypto-scheme based on the advanced DDOs is proposed. The FPGA implementation of the proposed crypto-scheme achieves higher throughput value and minimizes the allocated resources than the conventional designs. Design of the DDO boxes of different orders is considered and their ASIC implementation is estimated.     

Tri-axial sensors and actuators made of a single piezoelectric cylindrical shell

Electromechanical transducers for sensing and actuating disturbances or vibrations have been used in many fields of applications. There have been transducers of different configuration developed for the unidirectional transduction. This paper demonstrates a single element transducer for tri-axial components made of a piezoelectric cylindrical shell. The separation of the tri-axial transductions is achieved by devising a proper electrode arrangement. The structure and the fundamental idea are first presented, and then the numerical analysis by means of the finite element modeling follows, and their characteristics and behaviors are then experimentally verified.     

Ring‐opening polymerization of lactones initiated by diphenylzinc–coinitiator systems

Diphenylzinc, alone or in combination with water and butanone as coinitiators, was used as a polymerization initiator system for a variety of lactones at varying temperatures. The resulting data indicate that the course of the polymerization is greatly influenced by the lactone structure, as well as by the molar ratio of coinitiator to diphenylzinc. When used alone, diphenylzinc exhibited high activity as an initiator in δ‐valerolactone polymerizations, although it was less efficient when used in the β‐butyrolactone and the β‐propiolactone polymerizations. Activity in the polymerization of β‐lactones was increased by adding small amounts of butanone or water. It was also observed that the diphenylzinc–butanone combination was more effective than the diphenylzinc–water mixture in the polymerizations of β‐butyrolactone and β‐propiolactone. Copyright © 2003 Society of Chemical Industry     

Electrical Properties of GeO2–NiO Materials Containing Ni2GeO4

The GeO₂–NiO system is studied in the stability range of Ni₂GeO₄ by temperature-dependent resistivity measurements, in combination with x-ray diffraction, differential thermal analysis, and thermogravimetry. The resistivity of the starting mixtures and heat-treated samples is measured in the composition range 55–90 mol % NiO. The effect of air humidity on the resistivity of the samples is examined.     

A multigrid accelerated hybrid unstructured mesh method for 3D compressible turbulent flow

 A cell vertex finite volume method for the solution of steady compressible turbulent flow problems on unstructured hybrid meshes of tetrahedra, prisms, pyramids and hexahedra is described. These hybrid meshes are constructed by firstly discretising the computational domain using tetrahedral elements and then by merging certain tetrahedra. A one equation turbulence model is employed and the solution of the steady flow equations is obtained by explicit relaxation. The solution process is accelerated by the addition of a multigrid method, in which the coarse meshes are generated by agglomeration, and by parallelisation. The approach is shown to be effective for the simulation of a number of 3D flows of current practical interest. Sponsored by The Research Council of Norway, project number 125676/410 Dedicated to the memory of Prof. Mike Crisfield, a respected colleague     

Fatigue crack propagation of multiple coplanar cracks with the coupled extended finite element/fast marching method

A numerical technique for modeling fatigue crack propagation of multiple coplanar cracks is presented. The proposed method couples the extended finite element method (X-FEM) [Int. J. Numer. Meth. Engng. 48 (11) (2000) 1549] to the fast marching method (FMM) [Level Set Methods & Fast Marching Methods: Evolving Interfaces in Computational Geometry, Fluid Mechanics, Computer Vision, and Materials Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1999]. The entire crack geometry, including one or more cracks, is represented by a single signed distance (level set) function. Merging of distinct cracks is handled naturally by the FMM with no collision detection or mesh reconstruction required. The FMM in conjunction with the Paris crack growth law is used to advance the crack front. In the X-FEM, a discontinuous function and the two-dimensional asymptotic crack-tip displacement fields are added to the finite element approximation to account for the crack using the notion of partition of unity [Comput. Meth. Appl. Mech. Engng. 139 (1996) 289]. This enables the domain to be modeled by a single fixed finite element mesh with no explicit meshing of the crack surfaces. In an earlier study [Engng. Fract. Mech. 70 (1) (2003) 29], the methodology, algorithm, and implementation for three-dimensional crack propagation of single cracks was introduced. In this paper, simulations for multiple planar cracks are presented, with crack merging and fatigue growth carried out without any user-intervention or remeshing.     

Finding all hops shortest paths

In this letter, we introduce and investigate a new problem referred to as the All Hops Shortest Paths (AHSP) problem. The AHSP problem involves selecting, for all hop counts, the shortest paths from a given source to any other node in a network. We derive a tight lower bound on the worst-case computational complexities of the optimal comparison-based solutions to AHSP.     

Graphitization of porous 6H-SiC layers during thermal treatment in vacuum

We have studied the effect of thermal treatment in vacuum on the optical transmission of 6H-SiC samples with a porous layer on the Si face in the visible and near infrared spectral range. An analysis of changes in the absorption coefficient shows that the process of graphitization begins at a temperature below 70°C.