High Performance Process Variations Aware Technique for Sub-threshold 8T-SRAM Cell

The demand of low power high density integrated circuits is increasing in modern battery operated portable systems. Sub-threshold region of MOS transistors is the most desirable region for energy efficient circuit design. The operating ultra-low power supply voltage is the key design constraint with accurate output performance in sub-threshold region. Degrading of the performance metrics in Static random access memory (SRAM) cell with process variation effects are of major concern in sub-threshold region. In this paper, a bootstrapped driver circuit and a bootstrapped driver dynamic body biasing technique is proposed to assist write operation which improves the write-ability of sub-threshold 8T-SRAM cell under process variations. The bootstrapped driver circuit minimizes the write delay of SRAM cell. The bootstrapped driver dynamic body bias increases the output voltage levels by boosting factor therefore increasing in switching threshold voltage of MOS devices during hold and read operation of SRAM latch. The increment in threshold voltage improves the static noise margin and minimizing the process variation effects. Monte-Carlo simulation results with 3 \(\sigma \) Gaussian distributions show the improvements in write delay by 11.25 %, read SNM by 12.20 % and write SNM by 12.57 % in 8T-SRAM cell under process variations at 32 nm bulk CMOS process technology node.     

Moralism: mobility prediction with link stability based multicast routing protocol in MANETs

In recent research, link stability is getting tremendous attention in mobile adhoc networks (MANETs), because of several impediments that occur in a reliable and robust network. Link stability metric is used to improve network performance in terms of end-to-end delay, data success delivery ratio (DSDR) and available route time (ART). Energy consumption, bandwidth and communication delay of major concern in ad hoc networks. A high mobility of MANET nodes reduces the reliability of network communication. In a dynamic networks, high mobility of the nodes makes it very difficult to predict the dynamic routing topology and hence cause route/link failures. Multicast in MANETs is an emerging trend that effectively improves the performance while lowering the energy consumption and bandwidth usage. Multicast routing protocol transmits a packet to multicast a group at a given time instant to achieve a better utilization of resources. In this paper, node mobility is considered to map better their movement in the network. So, the links with long active duration time can be identified as a stable link for route construction. Variation in signal strength is used to identify whether the direction of the node is towards or away from estimating node. We consider signal strength as QoS metric to calculate link stability for route construction. Efforts are made to identify the link with highly probable longer lifetime as the best suitable link between two consecutive nodes. We predict the movement time of nodes that define the route path to the node destination. Exata/cyber simulator is used for network simulation. The simulation results of the proposed routing protocol are compared with on-demand multicast routing protocol and E-ODMRP, which works on minimum hop count path. Analysis of our simulation results has shown improvement of various routing performance metrics such as DSDR, ART, routing overhead and packet drop ratio.     

An Enhanced MPR OLSR Protocol for Efficient Node Selection Process in Cognitive Radio Based VANET

Wireless Personal Communications - A VANET is an excellent instance of a wireless sensor network. The mobile vehicles are the nodes and communication happens between the vehicular nodes. This...     

The design and evaluation of an end-to-end handoff management protocol

We introduce an efficient protocol for end-to-end handoff management in heterogeneous wireless IP-based networks. The protocol is based on the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP), and employs a soft-handoff mechanism that uses end-to-end semantics for signaling handoffs and for transmitting control messages. The design goal of this protocol is twofold—first, to reduce the home registration delay, and, second, to eliminate the tunnelling cost which exists in current proposals, such as Mobile IP and its derivatives. Furthermore, we propose successive enhancements to the initial mobility management framework for achieving better scalability. We present strong analytical and simulation-based results that show performance improvements over existing approaches. Antonios Argyriou is a Ph.D. candidate in the school of electrical and computer engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his M.S. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003, and the diploma from Democritus University of Thrace in 2001, both in electrical and computer engineering. His research interests spawn in all aspects of computer networking while specific interests include wireless networks and multimedia communications. He is a student member of IEEE and ACM. Vijay Madisetti is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He splits his time among teaching, research and entrepreneurship. His interests are design, prototyping, and packaging of electronic systems, virtual prototyping, embedded software systems, and computer networks. He obtained his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the IEEE and the Computer Society.     

Comparison of dicarboxylic acids as complexing agents for abrasive-free chemical mechanical planarization of copper

Abrasive particles used in chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) of copper often agglomerate and cause scratches on the finished surface. Abrasive-free CMP offers a feasible solution to this problem, and our present work examines four dicarboxylic acids (oxalic, malonic, succinic and glutaric, with increasing carbon chain lengths) as possible complexing agents for such a chemically dominated CMP process. At pH 3.0-4.0, oxalic and malonic acids are most effective for abrasive-free Cu removal. The rates of Cu dissolution and polish (with or without abrasives) are correlated with pH dependent distributions of mono-anionic (for oxalic and malonic) and neutral (for succinic and glutaric) acid species. The surface morphologies of a Cu wafers obtained by abrasive-free CMP in these acids also are more defect free and flat compared to those obtained using abrasives.     

Transporting compressed video over ATM networks with explicit-ratefeedback control

We propose a scheme for transmission of variable bit rate (VBR) compressed video for interactive applications using the explicit-rate congestion-control mechanisms proposed for the available bit rate (ABR) service in asynchronous transfer mode networks. Compressed video is inherently bursty, with rate fluctuations over both short and long time scales. This source behavior can be accommodated by the ABR service, since the explicit-rate scheme allows sources to request varying amounts of bandwidth over time. Moreover, when the bandwidth demand cannot be met, the network provides feedback indicating the bandwidth currently available to a connection. In our scheme, the video source rate is matched to the available bandwidth by modifying the quantization level used during compression. We use trace-driven simulations to examine how effective the enhanced explicit-rate scheme is in “rate matching” between the network and the source and the effect on end-to-end delay. We also look at the sensitivity of the proposed scheme to the estimates of the network round-trip times and to inaccuracies in the rate requests made by sources     

A 2D Transconductance and Sub-threshold behavior model for triple material surrounding gate (TMSG) MOSFETs

A 2D analytical model for transconductance, Sub-threshold current and Sub-threshold swing for Triple Material Surrounding Gate MOSFET (TMSG) is presented in this paper. Based on the solution of two dimensional Poisson equation, the physics based model of sub-threshold current of the device is derived. The model also includes the effect of gate oxide thickness and silicon thickness on the sub-threshold swing characteristics. Transconductance to drain current ratio of the triple material surrounding gate is calculated since it is a better criterion to access the performance of the device. The effectiveness of TMSG design was scrutinized by comparing with other triple material and dual material gate structures. Moreover the effect of technology parameter variations is also studied and proposed. This proposed model offers basic guidance for design of TMSG MOSFETs. The results of the analytical model are compared with the MEDICI simulation results thus providing validity of the proposed model.     

The Asymmetric Golden Code for Fast Decoding on Time-Varying Channels

The golden code is a full-rate full-diversity space–time code for the two-input two-output channel with good performance but high decoding complexity. The overlaid Alamouti codes were recently proposed as an alternative; in exchange for a slight performance penalty, they have lower decoding complexity on quasistatic channels with QAM alphabets. However, the complexity advantage of the overlaid codes vanishes for time-varying channels. This paper proposes the asymmetric golden code, a novel full-rate and full-diversity space–time code for the two-input two-output channel that offers reduced-complexity decoding on both quasistatic and time-varying channels.     

Globally optimal transmitter placement for indoor wireless communication systems

A global optimization technique is applied to solve the optimal transmitter placement problem for indoor wireless systems. An efficient pattern search algorithm - DIviding RECTangles (DIRECT) of Jones et al.- has been connected to a parallel three-dimensional radio propagation ray tracing modeler running on a 200-node Beowulf cluster of Linux workstations. Surrogate functions for a parallel wideband code-division multiple-access (WCDMA) simulator were used to estimate the system performance for the global optimization algorithm. Power coverage and bit-error rate are considered as two different criteria for optimizing locations of a specified number of transmitters across the feasible region of the design space. This paper briefly describes the underlying radio propagation and WCDMA simulations and focuses on the design issues of the optimization loop.