Computer-controlled mechanical simulation of the artificially ventilated human respiratory system

A mechanical lung simulator can be used to simulate specific lung pathologies, to test lung-function equipment, and in instruction. A new approach to mechanical simulation of lung behavior is introduced that uses a computer-controlled active mechatronic system. The main advantage of this approach is that the static and dynamic properties of the simulator can easily be adjusted via the control software. A nonlinear single-compartment mathematical model of the artificially ventilated respiratory system has been derived and incorporated into the simulator control system. This model can capture both the static and dynamic compliance of the respiratory system as well as nonlinear flow-resistance properties. Parameters in this model can be estimated by using data from artificially ventilated patients. It is shown that the simulation model fits patient data well. This mathematical model of the respiratory system was then matched to a model of the available physical equipment (the simulator, actuators, and the interface electronics) in order to obtain the desired lung behavior. A significant time delay in the piston motion control loop has been identified, which can potentially cause oscillations or even instability for high compliance values. Therefore, a feedback controller based on the Smith-predictor scheme was developed to control the piston motion. The control system, implemented on a personal computer, also includes a user-friendly interface to allow easy parameter setting.     

A novel structure of the fully differential CMOS amplifier with symmetric active load

In this article, we propose a novel general structure of a linear symmetric fully differential voltage amplifier with a symmetric output. It is applicable to all sets of complementary component pairs such as BJT, JFET and MOSFET. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed circuit in comparison with the state-of-the-art solutions. The characteristics are illustrated in both frequency and time domains, and a comparison is given between the proposed amplifier and the traditional differential amplifier with a current mirror as an active load for the same set of complementary components in CMOS equally sized W/L = 150/3 technology. The static voltage transfer characteristic of the proposed amplifier has an extremely small linearity error. The deviation from the linear characteristics is less than 0.018 mV for the amplitude of the output differential voltage of 1 Vpp. The common-mode gain by symmetric output is negligible because the proposed structure is fully symmetric. The simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed amplifier.     

Phase-synchroniser based on gm-C all-pass filter chain with sliding mode control

Phase-synchronisers have many applications in VLSI circuit designs. They are used in CMOS RF circuits including phase (de)modulators, phase recovery circuits, multiphase synthesis, etc. In this article, a phase-synchroniser based on g_m-C all-pass filter chain with sliding mode control is presented. The filter chain provides good controllable delay characteristics over the full range of phase and frequency regulation, without deterioration of input signal amplitude and waveform, while the sliding mode control enables us to achieve fast and predetermined finite locking time. IHP 0.25 µm SiGe BiCMOS technology has been used in design and verification processes. The circuit operates in the frequency range from 33 MHz up to 150 MHz. Simulation results indicate that it is possible to achieve very fast synchronisation time period, which is approximately four time intervals of the input signal during normal operation, and 20 time intervals during power-on.     

A Parallel Hill Climbing Algorithm for Pushing Dependent Data in Clients–Providers–Servers Systems

The up-link bandwidth in satellite networks and in advanced traffic wireless information system is very limited. A server broadcasts data files provided by different independent providers and accessed by many clients in a round-robin manner. The clients who access these files may have different patterns of access. Some clients may wish to access several files in any order (AND), some wish to access one out of several files (OR), and some clients may access a second file only after accessing another file (IMPLY). The goal of the server is to order the files in a way that minimizes the access time of the clients given some a priori knowledge of their access patterns. An appropriate clients–servers model was recently proposed by Bay-Noy, Naor and Schieber. They formulated three separate problems and proposed an algorithm that evaluates certain number of random permutations and chooses the one whose access time is minimized. In this paper, we formulate a combined AOI (AND-OR-IMPLY) problem, and propose to apply a parallel hill climbing algorithm (to each of the four problems), which begins from certain number of random permutations, and then applies hill climbing technique on each of them until there is no more improvement. The evaluation time of neighboring permutations generated in hill climbing process is optimized, so that it requires O(n) time per permutation instead of O(n ²) time required for evaluating access time of a random permutation, where n is the number of files the server broadcasts. Experiments indicate that the parallel hill climbing algorithm is O(n) times faster that random permutations method, both in terms of time needed to evaluate the same number of permutations, and time needed to provide a high quality solution. Thus the improvement is significant for broadcasting large number of files.     

New neural method for bias dependent noise modelling of microwave transistors

A new method for accurate determination of noise parameters of microwave transistors for various bias conditions is proposed in this paper. The proposed model consists of a transistor empirical noise model (modification of Pospieszalski’s noise model) and two artificial neural networks. With the aim to avoid extraction of the empirical model parameters for each bias point, an artificial neural network is used to introduce bias-dependence of the equivalent circuit parameters. Accuracy of such bias-dependent model is further improved by using an additional neural network aimed to correct the noise parameters’ values. The proposed modeling approach is exemplified by modelling of a MESFET device in packaged form. The noise parameters obtained by the simulation agree well with the measured data.     

A generalized correlation attack on a class of stream ciphers based on the Levenshtein distance

A statistical approach to cryptanalysis of a memoryless function of clock-controlled shift registers is introduced. In the case of zero-order correlation immunity, an algorithm for a shift register initial state reconstruction based on the sequence comparison concept is proposed. A constrained Levenshtein distance relevant for the cryptanalysis is defined and a novel recursive procedure for its efficient computation is derived. Preliminary experimental results are given and open theoretic problems are discussed.Following [11], a Boolean function f(x ₁,..., x _n) is said to be mth-order correlation immune if m is the maximum integer such that the random variable f(X ₁,..., X _n) is statistically independent of every set of m random variables chosen from the balanced and independent binary random variables X ₁,..., X _n.     

Characterization and Optimization of a Resonant Cavity Enhanced P-i-N Photodiode Response

This paper presents linear pulse response of a Resonant Cavity Enhanced (RCE) P-i-N fotodiode. The RCE P-i-N photodiode designed for high-speed aplication is analysed for various submicron thicknesses of absorption layer, bias voltages, active areas and incident pulse optical excitations. The results are obtained by numerical simulation of the complete phenomenological model for two valley semiconductor. Great enhancement of the quantum efficiency and the product bandwidth-quantum efficiency, is obvious from obtained results for this photodiode type.     

The application of Ramo's theorem to the impulse response calculation of a reach-through avalanche photodiode

A method for calculation the impulse response of a depletion layer of a semiconductor device based on Ramo's theorem is described. Using this method the impulse response of a reach-through avalanche photodiode is derived.     

A new peak detector based on usage of second-generation current conveyors

A new precision peak detector (full-wave rectifier) of input sinusoidal signals, which employs four two second-generation current conveyors and five metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors, is presented in this paper. The circuit gives a dc output voltage that is the peak input voltage over a wide frequency range, with a very low ripple voltage and low harmonic distortion. The proposed circuits use an all-pass filter as a 90° phase shifter of the processed input signal. The results of the calculations are verified using SPICE simulations.