Advanced Bioresponsive Multitasking Hydrogels in the New Era of Biomedicine

Advanced forms of hydrogels have many inherently desirable properties and can be designed with different structures and functions. In particular, bioresponsive multifunctional hydrogels can carry out sophisticated biological functions. These include in situ single-cell approaches, capturing, analysis, and release of living cells, biomimetics of cell, tissue, and tumor-specific niches. They can allow in vivo cell manipulation and act as novel drug delivery systems, allowing diagnostic, therapeutic, vaccination, and immunotherapy methods. In the present review of multitasking hydrogels, new approaches and devices classified into point-of-care testing (POCT), microarrays, single-cell/rare cell approaches, artificial membranes, biomimetic modeling systems, nanodoctors, and microneedle patches are summarized. The potentials and application of each format are critically discussed, and some limitations are highlighted. Finally, how hydrogels can enable an “all-in-one platform” to play a key role in cancer therapy, regenerative medicine, and the treatment of inflammatory, degenerative, genetic, and metabolic diseases is being looked forward to.     

Gain improvement and microwave operation of 4H–SiC MESFET with a new recessed metal ring structure

A new multi-recessed 4H-SiC MESFET with recessed metal ring for RF embedded circuits is proposed (MR2-MESFET). The key idea in the proposed structure is based on the elimination of the spaces adjacent to gate and stopped the depletion region extending towards drain and source and the reduction of the channel thickness between gate and drain to increase breakdown voltage (V_BR); meanwhile the elimination of the gate depletion layer extension to source/drain to decrease gate-source capacitance (C_gs). The influence of multi-recessed drift region and recessed metal ring structures on the characteristics of the MR2-MESFET is studied by numerical simulation. The optimized results show that the V_BR of the MR2-MESFET is 119% larger than that of the conventional 4H–SiC MESFET (C-MESFET); meanwhile maintain 85% higher saturation drain current. Therefore, the maximum output power density of the MR2-MESFET is 23.1 W/mm compared to 5.5 W/mm of the C-MESFET. Also, the cut-off frequency (f_T) and the maximum oscillation frequency (f_max) of 24.9 and 91.7 GHz are obtained for the MR2-MESFET compared to 11 and 40 GHz of the C-MESFET structure, respectively. The proposed MR2-MESFET shows a maximum stable gain (MSG) exceeding 23.6 dB at 3.1 GHz which is the highest gain yet reported for SiC MESFETs, showing the potential of this device for high power RF applications.     

A Class of Sequential Blind Source Separation Method in Order Using Swarm Optimization Algorithm

We consider the problem of sequential, blind source separation in some specific order from a mixture of sub- and sup-Gaussian sources. Three methods of separation are developed, specifically, kurtosis maximization using (a) particle swarm optimization, (b) differential evolution, and (c) artificial bee colony algorithm, all of which produce the separation in decreasing order of the absolute kurtosis based on the maximization of the kurtosis cost function. The validity of the methods was confirmed through simulation. Moreover, compared with other conventional methods, the proposed method separated the various sources with greater accuracy. Finally, we performed a real-world experiment to separate electroencephalogram (EEG) signals from a super-determined mixture with Gaussian noise. Whereas the conventional methods separate simultaneously EEG signals of interest along with noise, the result of this example shows the proposed methods recover from the outset solely those EEG signals of interest. This feature will be of benefit in many practical applications.     

CaPPS: cache partitioning with partial sharing for multi-core embedded systems

As the number of cores in chip multi-processor systems increases, the contention over shared last-level cache (LLC) resources increases, thus making LLC optimization critical, especially for embedded systems with strict area/energy/power constraints. We propose cache partitioning with partial sharing (CaPPS), which reduces LLC contention using cache partitioning and improves utilization with sharing configuration. Sharing configuration enables the partitions to be privately allocated to a single core, partially shared with a subset of cores, or fully shared with all cores based on the co-executing applications’ requirements. CaPPS imposes low hardware overhead and affords an extensive design space to increase optimization potential. To facilitate fast design space exploration, we develop an analytical model to quickly estimate the miss rates of all CaPPS configurations using the applications’ isolated LLC access traces to predict runtime LLC contention. Experimental results demonstrate that the analytical model estimates cache miss rates with an average error of only 0.73 % and with an average speedup of \(3505\times \) as compared to a cycle-accurate simulator. Due to CaPPS’s extensive design space, CaPPS can reduce the average LLC miss rate by as much as 25 % as compared to baseline configurations and as much as 14–17 % as compared to prior works.     

A Power Efficient Test Data Compression Method for SoC using Alternating Statistical Run-Length Coding

A power efficient System-on-a-Chip test data compression method using alternating statistical run-length coding is proposed. To effectively reduce test power dissipation, the test set is firstly preprocessed by 2D reordering scheme. To further improve the compression ratio, 4 m partitioning of the runs and a smart filling of the don’t care bits provide the nice results, and alternating statistical run-length coding scheme is developed to encode the preprocessed test set. In addition, a simple decoder is obtained which consumed a little area overhead. The benchmark circuits verify the proposed power efficient coding method well. Experimental results show it obtains a high compression ratio, low scan-in test power dissipation and little extra area overhead during System-on-a-Chip scan testing.     

A distributed range-free correction vector based localization refinement algorithm

Localization problem is an important and challenging topic in today’s wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a novel localization refinement algorithm for LAEP, which is a range-free localization algorithm by using expected hop progress, has been put forward. The proposed localization refinement algorithm, called as CVLR, is based on position correction vectors and can resolve the LAEP’s hop-distance ambiguity problem, which can lead to adjacent unknown nodes localized at the same or very close positions. CVLR can make full use of the relative position relationship of 1-hop neighboring nodes (called as CVLR1), or 1-hop and 2-hop neighboring nodes (called as CVLR2), to iteratively refine their localization positions. Furthermore, from localization accuracy and energy dissipation perspective, we optimize the communication process of CVLR2 and propose an energy-efficient improved CVLR. Simulation results show that the localization accuracy of CVLR1, CVLR2, and the improved CVLR are obviously higher than that of LAEP and DV-RND.     

A routing algorithm for reducing optical loss in photonic Networks-on-Chip

Driven by increase in automation, smart homes play an important role in today’s human life. This paper presents a new model for smart home technologies based on multi-device bidirectional visible light communication (VLC). For multiple devices and users, orthogonal code-based wavelength division (color beams) full-duplexed bidirectional VLC link is proposed. The color beams from RGB LEDs are utilized to transmit data and synchronize multi-device transmission. To enhance the performance of the proposed model, receiver diversity is also employed. Performance evaluation reveals that the proposed VLC-based model for smart homes is efficient with superior BER performance in a typical smart home environment except for the far corners. The maximum achievable data rate for each user up to four users is found to be 24 Mbps at both uplink and downlink transmissions.     

Resource efficiency improved approach for shared path protection in EONs

For improving the resource efficiency of dynamic shared path protection in elastic optical networks, a survivable RSA (SRSA)-based heuristic algorithm is proposed in the paper. In SRSA, an adaptive adjustment link cost function is devised to effectively select working and protection paths. The cost function sufficiently considers available spectrum resources and the length of light paths for both working and protection paths. In order to achieve high resource efficiency, a spectrum allocation strategy named minimal cost stable set is proposed to allocate spectrum for protection paths with respect to the resource efficiency in the link cost function. And the graph coloring algorithm is introduced to select the shared protection path with the highest resource efficiency for the request. Compared with the shared path protection and dynamic load balancing shared path protection, simulation results show that the proposed SRSA decreases bandwidth blocking probability and achieves high resource efficiency.     

Temperature compensated and gated CMOS ring oscillator for time-to-digital converter application

This paper presents a CMOS voltage controlled ring oscillator with temperature compensation for low power time-to-digital converters (TDCs). In order to maintain the oscillation frequency stable, a novel compensation circuit is proposed through adaptively sensing temperature variations. This design has been implemented in TSMC 0.35 μm CMOS standard process with an active area of under 0.039 mm². Experimental results show that the clock frequency is around 159.0 MHz only with a power consumption of 550 μA. As respective to the room temperature the maximum frequency variation is between ?3.46 and +3.08 % under temperature range of ?40 to 85 °C. The bit error time induced by clock jitter is limited within 4.8 % in the whole clock period, and the differential nonlinearity of the TDC is less than 0.408 LSB.