Energy efficient hybrid full adder design for digital signal processing in nanoelectronics

Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing - In recent years, there has been a growing interest in energy efficient VLSI designs for portable devices. Full adder cell is one of the most...     

The effects of short‐term and long‐term exposure to extreme cold environment on the body’s physiological responses: An experimental study

There is little epidemiological data to make reliable conclusions about the effects of exposure to cold on the body’s physiological responses. The current study aimed to address this lacuna in the available research. The study sample consisted of 50 outdoor mechanic workers as a case group and 15 staff members as a control group used in the outdoor automechanic workshops. Air environmental factors, including dry‐bulb temperature and air velocity, were measured by the portable hot wire thermo anemometer in the workstation of each subject. The body’s physiological responses were also measured during daily activities in accordance with ISO 9886. Using Semmes–Weinstein monofilament, touch sensory tests were conducted for determining hands’ sensorineural functions. The baseline measurements showed the mechanic workers had lower finger sensation levels and finger skin temperatures than the control group (p < 0.05). This may be attributed to long‐term exposure to acute cold air during cold seasons. However, after short‐term exposure to extreme cold environment, the mechanic workers showed lower losses in finger skin temperatures and finger sensation levels than the control group ( p < 0.05). The findings confirmed that prolonged localized cold exposure among mechanic workers can result in localized habituation of vasoconstrictor responses.     

Efficient radix-r adders for nanoelectronics

In this study, a new design method and efficient designs for radix-r adders are proposed for carbon nanotube field effect transistor (CNFET) FET nanotechnology. This application also investigates the capability of the nanoscale device for designing high-performance analogue circuits. The proposed designs benefit from the unique electrical properties of CNFET, such as near-ideal current voltage characteristics, very high transconductance, high-performance switches and very high-performance and high-gain binary inverters, at nanoscale. Moreover, adjustable threshold voltage and the same mobility of electrons and holes in a CNFET facilitate the design and modification procedures. The proposed design can be considered as an instance of a general adder, capable of adding radix-r digits with high precision. It is noteworthy that a very limited number of carbon nanotube diameters for designing the proposed adder are needed, which enhance the manufacturability. The proposed circuits are designed based on arithmetic relations and are also verified at 32 nm feature size using HSPICE and the Stanford standard SPICE model.     

A switched energy saving position controller for variable-pressure electro-hydraulic servo systems

The electro-hydraulic servo system (EHSS) demonstrates a relatively low level of efficiency compared to other available actuation methods. The objective of this paper is to increase this efficiency by introducing a variable supply pressure into the system and controlling this pressure during the task of position tracking. For this purpose, an EHSS structure with controllable supply pressure is proposed and its dynamic model is derived from the basic laws of physics. A switching control structure is then proposed to control both the supply pressure and the cylinder position at the same time, in a way that reduces the overall energy consumption of the system. The stability of the proposed switching control system is guaranteed by proof, and its performance is verified by experimental testing.     

A novel FPGA-programmable switch matrix interconnection element in quantum-dot cellular automata

The Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is a novel nanotechnology, promising extra low-power, extremely dense and very high-speed structure for the construction of logical circuits at a nanoscale. In this paper, initially previous works on QCA-based FPGA’s routing elements are investigated, and then an efficient, symmetric and reliable QCA programmable switch matrix (PSM) interconnection element is introduced. This element has a simple structure and offers a complete routing capability. It is implemented using a bottom-up design approach that starts from a dense and high-speed 2:1 multiplexer and utilise it to build the target PSM interconnection element. In this study, simulations of the proposed circuits are carried out using QCAdesigner, a layout and simulation tool for QCA circuits. The results demonstrate high efficiency of the proposed designs in QCA-based FPGA routing.     

Ergodic Sum Rate Maximization for Underlay Spectrum Sharing with Heterogeneous Traffic

A radio resource allocation framework is proposed for underlay spectrum sharing. The ergodic capacity maximization problem in orthogonal frequency division multiple access-based network on point to multi point transmission is formulated and solved. Heterogeneous traffic is also considered in which two types of traffic is assumed: streaming traffic which has strict delay requirements, and elastic traffic with flexible delay requirements. Considering the effect of channel state information (CSI) imperfection in the evaluation of the secondary users’ expected rate, we further assume that the estimated CSI between the secondary users and secondary base station (secondary channel) is not perfect. Moreover three different cases are considered depending on the availability of the CSI between the secondary base station and the primary receivers (interference channel). Using simulations, we evaluate the impact of streaming traffic and imperfect CSI on the sum capacity of the secondary elastic users for different values of parameter systems.     

Effective monitoring by efficient fingerprint matching using a forest of NAQ-trees

Sensor devices have been widely used in many applications, e.g., security, wildlife monitoring, critical health cases, etc. The sensors constantly capture information about the monitored case and encode the information into feature vectors, called fingerprints, which are sent to a central server for further analysis; the process is generally semi-automated. To ease the on-line analysis, the central server should maintain a reference database containing standard fingerprints representing the status of known conditions. The key operation is to find the matchings (i.e., nearest neighbors) for each fingerprint arriving from the remote sensor devices; thus the current status of each sensor device can be automatically determined. As the fingerprints are usually characterized by hundreds of dimensions and quick response is mostly the top priority in sensor based monitoring applications, the existing index structures for nearest neighbor search fail to properly satisfy such applications. In this paper, we propose a method that allows for fully automated monitoring by efficiently reporting the matchings for most fingerprints sent by the sensor devices. The proposed method consists of two steps; the first step clusters the reference database into r-separable clusters and one fingerprint (i.e., the centroid) is selected to represent each cluster. The second step builds indexes for the representative fingerprints using a set of NAQ-trees residing on multiple nodes of a parallel machine. In the query processing phase, the built indexes are queried in parallel and from each tree only a very small number of index nodes are searched to report the partial results, which are combined into the final result. Taking advantage of the “randomization” property and compact partitioning of the NAQ-tree construction, the union of the partial results is anticipated to cover most of the matchings; this has been demonstrated in the experiments that have been conducted to emphasize the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

A meshless approach for free transverse vibration of embedded single-walled nanotubes with arbitrary boundary conditions accounting for nonlocal effect

A single-walled nanotube structure embedded in an elastic matrix is simulated by the nonlocal Euler-Bernoulli, Timoshenko, and higher order beams. The beams are assumed to be elastically supported and attached to continuous lateral and rotational springs to take into account the effects of the surrounding matrix. The discrete equations of motion associated with free transverse vibration of each model are established in the context of the nonlocal continuum mechanics of Eringen using Hamilton's principle and an efficient meshless method. The effects of slenderness ratio of the nanotube, small scale effect parameter, initial axial force and the stiffness of the surrounding matrix on the natural frequencies of various beam models are investigated for different boundary conditions. The capabilities of the proposed nonlocal beam models in capturing the natural frequencies of the nanotube are also addressed.