Trade-off analysis on cost and manufacturing technology of an electronic product: Case study

A trade-off analysis on the cost and system packaging metrics of an electronic product aimed at the commercial/retail industry has been carried out. By comparing the system cost and packaging metrics with those of comparable consumer products, we have determined that there is opportunity for significant cost, size, and weight reduction of the overall electronics packaging system. These include the use of fine pitch IC packages, smaller discrete components, denser PCB wiring technology, double sided IC package surface mount, surface mount connectors, and improved plastics for the product housing. The analysis concluded that PCB area reduction of 40%, using a single PCB instead of three boards, reduction in board cost of over 50% and product weight reduction of over 28% are possible using available technologies.     

On the Locus of Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off in Reaction Time: Inferences From the Lateralized Readiness Potential.

Lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs) were used to determine the stage(s) of reaction time (RT) responsible for speed-accuracy trade-offs (SATs). Speeded decisions based on several types of information were examined in 3 experiments, involving, respectively, a line discrimination task, lexical decisions, and an Erikson flanker task. Three levels of SAT were obtained in each experiment by adjusting response deadlines with an adaptive tracking algorithm. Speed stress affected the duration of RT stages both before and after the start of the LRP in all experiments. The latter effect cannot be explained by guessing strategies, by variations in response force, or as an indirect consequence of the pre-LRP effect. Contrary to most models, it suggests that SAT can occur at a late postdecisional stage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Urban water demand,climatic variation,and irrigation-water insecurity: interactive stressors and lessons for water governance from the Angat River basin (Philippines)

Climatic variation and intersectoral water competition increasingly challenge the effective provision of irrigation services. This article explores their combined effects on irrigation allocation from the Angat Reservoir (Philippines), where domestic water use in Metro Manila has overtaken regional irrigation as the dominant right-holder. Rules protecting Metro Manila’s large right to water ‘interact’ with dry spells to affect irrigation security in wet and dry seasons. Historically, irrigators were uncompensated because re-allocation’s cause was contested as (1) an unforeseeable climatic event (releasing domestic utilities of liability), or (2) produced by urban demand (requiring compensation). Trade-off rules must be prepared to navigate combinatory effects.     

Estimating performance enhancement with alternate control strategies for multiloop control systems

A filter based methodology, studied earlier for SISO systems, is extended to MIMO systems. The presented approach facilitates the calculation of best achievable performance for proportional-integral (PI) controller and the optimal multiloop (ML) PI settings for stochastic disturbance rejection in ML control systems. The filter based approach is further extended to answer some of the key questions for ML control systems such as: (a) performance enhancement possible with the alternate pairing scheme, (b) benefits that will accrue through the employment of decouplers and (c) the performance achievable with the use of multivariable controller (as opposed to an ML controller). Further, the trade-off curve between output variance and control effort is generated for the various control configurations within PI controller domain.     

A Recommendation System Keeping Both Precision and Recall by Extraction of Uninteresting Information

A recommendation system which recommends interesting information to the target user must guarantee high precision and recall. However, there is trade-off between precision and recall. In this paper, we propose a web page recommendation method balancing both of them by take advantage of uninteresting information. The proposed method extracts the interest and uninterest indicators from not only historical interesting web pages but also uninteresting ones in a target genre. The historical interesting and uninteresting information is derived based on the browsing time and bookmarking. The proposed method can keep precision and recall by excluding the uninteresting information from the recommended ones based on the interest and uninterest indicators. The experimental result proved that the proposed method can improve the precision and recall than an existing method.     

Breaking the Responsivity-Bandwidth Trade-Off Limit in GaN Photoelectrodes for High-Response and Fast-Speed Optical Communication Application

Underwater optical communication (UOC) has attracted considerable interest in the continuous expansion of human activities in marine/ocean environments. The water-durable and self-powered photoelectrodes that act as a battery-free light receiver in UOC are particularly crucial, as they may directly face complex underwater conditions. Emerging photoelectrochemical (PEC)-type photodetectors are appealing owing to their intrinsic aqueous operation characteristics with versatile tunability of photoresponses. Herein, a self-powered PEC photodetector employing n-type gallium nitride (GaN) nanowires as a photoelectrode, which is decorated with an iridium oxide (IrO_x) layer to optimize charge transfer dynamics at the GaN/electrolyte interface, is reported. Strikingly, the constructed n-GaN/IrO_x photoelectrode breaks the responsivity-bandwidth trade-off limit by simultaneously improving the response speed and responsivity, delivering an ultrafast response speed with response/recovery times of only 2 µs/4 µs while achieving a high responsivity of 110.1 mA W⁻¹. Importantly, the device exhibits a large bandwidth with 3 dB cutoff frequency exceeding 100 kHz in UOC tests, which is one of the highest values among self-powered photodetectors employed in optical communication system.     

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer with fixed and adaptive modulation

Activating Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) in Radio-Frequency (RF) to provide on-demand energy supply to widely deployed Internet of Everything devices is a key to the next-generation energy self-sustainable 6G network. However, Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) in the same RF bands is challenging. The majority of previous studies compared SWIPT performance to Gaussian signaling with an infinite alphabet, which is impossible to implement in any realistic communication system. In contrast, we study the SWIPT system in a well-known Nakagami-m wireless fading channel using practical modulation techniques with finite alphabet. The attainable rate-energy-reliability tradeoff and the corresponding rationale are revealed for fixed modulation schemes. Furthermore, an adaptive modulation-based transceiver is provided for further expanding the attainable rate-energy-reliability region based on various SWIPT performances of different modulation schemes. The modulation switching thresholds and transmit power allocation at the SWIPT transmitter and the power splitting ratios at the SWIPT receiver are jointly optimized to maximize the attainable spectrum efficiency of wireless information transfer while satisfying the WPT requirement and the instantaneous and average BER constraints. Numerical results demonstrate the SWIPT performance of various fixed modulation schemes in different fading conditions. The advantage of the adaptive modulation-based SWIPT transceiver is validated.     

Assessing two new wearable input paradigms: The Finger-Joint-Gesture palm-keypad glove and the invisible phone clock

Text and digit entry speed of two wearable one-handed input paradigms, the Finger-Joint-Gesture palm-keypad glove and the Invisible Phone Clock, were benchmarked against traditional one-handed cellular phone keypad input in a repeated-measurement design employing 18 subjects using a 9-word sentence. No significant difference in error-corrected text entry speed (5.3 ec-wpm) was found. Digit entry speed was significantly faster (8.3 ec-wpm) and differed significantly between input paradigms. Furthermore, digit entry was fastest for the traditional cellular phone keypad and slowest for the Invisible Clock keypad. A prediction model based on Fitts' law slightly overestimated text entry speed for novice users. Another prediction model, where each movement time between successive keys was corrected for key repeat time for each specific input paradigm, predicted the experimental results more accurately. Thirteen of the subjects ranked the Invisible Phone Clock as 1^st choice. The subjects' mapping of the Ericsson cellular phone functions (YES, CLR, NO, <,> and Address Book) was not according to the designer's model, partly due to functional fixedness. The input paradigms could be suitable candidates for new fragmentised interfaces where wearability is the key issue.     

Memory abilities in action video game players

Action video game players (AVGPs) have been shown to outperform non-action video game players (NVGPs) on tasks of perception and attention. Here we set out to investigate if these benefits also extended to another cognitive domain, memory. In particular, while there is some previous evidence suggesting AVGPs demonstrate better visual short-term memory, it is unclear whether this extends to long-term memory processes or indeed, whether these enhancements are due to memory per se or are instead reflective of changes in speed of processing or strategy. Using four tasks that tap distinct areas of memory processing we found evidence for greater speed of processing and enhanced visual short-term memory in AVGPs and compared to NVGPs. However, we found either equivalent or possibly decreased performance in AVGPs in tasks related to long-term memory access. Furthermore, differences in strategy were noted across tasks, in particular differences in the tradeoff between speed and accuracy, which calls for a closer investigation of how task instructions bias performance in future studies.