Coarse-grained fabrics are comprised of multi-bit configurable logic blocks and configurable interconnect. This work is focused on area and energy optimization techniques for coarse-grained reconfigurable fabric architectures. In this work, a variety of design techniques have been explored to improve the utilization of computational resources and increase energy savings. This includes splitting, folding, multi-level vertical interconnect. In addition to this, I have also studied fully connected homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures, and 3D architecture. I have also examined some of the hybrid strategies of computation unit’s arrangements. In order to perform energy and area analysis, I selected a set of signal and image processing benchmarks from MediaBench suite. I implemented various fabric architectures on 90nm ASIC process from Synopsys. Results show area improvement with energy savings as compared to baseline architecture.

This study examined the impact of open-market stock repurchases by Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) on the share price of the featured company. Two aspects of investment finance are rational behaviour and efficient markets. Both of these concepts were explored to understand why a share repurchase would have an impact on a company share price.Causal research was conducted to analyse the correlation between a share repurchase event and the share price of the featured company. The share buyback announcements were collected from the Bloomberg database. The holding period returns were calculated and compared to zero to analyse whether there was any momentum or contrarian signals. The holding period returns were also adjusted for the average of the all REIT index to ascertain whether the returns were abnormal or not.The results have shown share repurchase transactions to be contrarian indicators of share price performance. Even when the results were adjusted for the REIT index, the negative returns continued. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Submitted by Gabriela Lopes (gmachadolopesufpel@gmail.com) on 2018-11-20T11:22:01Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) TESE LILIANE NOVELINI.pdf: 1608342 bytes, checksum: 7aa5a253aa23bfa4c90e8251f6eb62e4 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Aline Batista (alinehb.ufpel@gmail.com) on 2018-11-23T18:32:07Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 TESE LILIANE NOVELINI.pdf: 1608342 bytes, checksum: 7aa5a253aa23bfa4c90e8251f6eb62e4 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-11-23T18:32:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 TESE LILIANE NOVELINI.pdf: 1608342 bytes, checksum: 7aa5a253aa23bfa4c90e8251f6eb62e4 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-07-20 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / O consórcio de culturas é uma prática comum em muitas propriedades familiares do Brasil, o consórcio milho e feijão é o mais comum no Brasil, sendo utilizado para melhorar o aproveitamento da área de cultivo da propriedade, sendo necessário a busca de novas estratégias para melhoria da eficiência desse sistema de cultivo. As avaliações dos sistemas de consorciação restringem-se apenas ao emprego do uso eficiente da terra (UET) e análises agronômicas de rendimento das culturas. Desta forma, justifica-se o emprego de outros parâmetros para análise dos componentes que interferem no sistema de consorciação. Objetivou-se com este trabalho, no período da safrinha, avaliar o uso eficiente da terra e o desempenho biológico de sistemas consorciados de milho e feijão, e verificar o arranjo de plantas consorciadas de milho e feijão eficientes no aproveitamento da radiação solar incidente e na produtividade. Foram avaliadas duas cultivares de milho, da coleção CPACT (Tupi Laranja) e (BRS Missões), e a cultivar de feijão BRS Expedito, os quais foram analisados em monocultivo e em cultivo consorciado em três arranjos de plantas, totalizando nove tratamentos no delineamento blocos ao acaso, com quatro repetições. Cada parcela mediu 5,60 m de comprimento por 4,80 m de largura. Para avaliação dos componentes da produção e da produtividade das culturas foram colhidas as plantas de duas linhas centrais da parcela para cada cultura. Foram determinadas, para o milho, as variáveis produtividade de grãos (kg ha-1), número de espigas, de grãos/espiga e peso de 100 grãos e para o feijão produtividade de grãos (kg ha-1), número de grãos por vagem, número vagens por planta, número de vagens chochas e peso de 100 grãos. Para medir a radiação solar incidente foram instalados tubos solarímetros, em cada sistema de consórcio, a distância de 1,00 m acima do dossel da cultura do feijão. Os dados de radiação solar foram armazenados em um sistema de aquisição de dados instalado na área experimental. Posteriormente os dados foram coletados, agrupados, analisados e interpretados. Os dados de produtividade foram submetidos a análise de variância e, quando significativo pelo teste de F a 5% de probabilidade,as médias foram comparadas utilizando o teste de Duncan ao nível de 5% de significância. Entre os tratamentos, evidenciou-se que o feijão semeado na entre linha do milho (1:1), foi o que obteve melhor resultado quanto ao uso eficiente da terra e índice de eficiência biológica, não afetando a produtividade do milho quando comparado ao monocultivo. Os tratamentos com maior espaçamento (3F:2M) entre plantas de milho proporcionaram maior penetração de radiação solar para o cultivo do feijão. As populações de feijoeiro no tratamento 1 (1F:1M) não interferiram na quantidade de radiação solar disponível para a cultura do milho e nem na sua produtividade. / The intercropping consortium is a common practice in many Brazilian family farms, the maize and beans consortium is the most common in Brazil, being used to improve the use of the property cultivation area, and it is necessary to search for new strategies to improve the efficiency of this cropping system. Evaluations of intercropping systems are restricted only to the use of efficient land use (UET) and agronomic crop yield analyzes. There fore, it is justified the use of other parameters to analyze the components that interfere in the consortium system. The objective of this work was to evaluate the efficient use of land and the biological performance of intercropped systems of maize and beans, and to verify the arrangement of intercropping plants of corn and beans, efficient in the use of incoming solar radiation and productivity. Two maize cultivars from the CPACT (Tupi Laranja) and (BRS Missões) collection and the BRS Expedito bean cultivar were evaluated, which were analyzed in monoculture and intercropping in three plant arrangements, totaling nine treatments in the block design at random, with four replicates. Each plot measured 5.60 m long by 4.80 m wide. For the evaluation of the components of crop production and yield, the plants of two plot lines were harvested for each crop. The variables grain yield (kg ha-1), number of ears, grain / spike and weight of 100 grains were determined for maize, and for grain yield (kg ha-1), number of grains per pod, number pods per plant, number of pods pods and weight of 100 grains. To measure the incident solar radiation, solarimeters were installed in each consortium system, the distance of 1.00 m above the canopy of the bean crop. The solar radiation data were stored in a data acquisition system installed in the experimental area. Subsequently the data were collected, grouped, analyzed and interpreted. The treatments with greater spacing (3F: 2M) among maize plants provided greater penetration of solar radiation for bean cultivation. Bean populations in treatment 1 (1F: 1M) did not interfere in the amount of solar radiation available for maize or in their productivity.

Wireless communication systems are growing at an unprecedented pace, making the wireless spectrum at a premium, especially as billions of new Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices worldwide are demanding wireless connections. To accommodate the ever-growing spectrum demand, a promising solution is Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) that enables two users to communicate with the same spectrum resource at the same time, while decoding the two-user superimposed signal at the receiver. By doing this, the previously detrimental wireless interference caused by two concurrent transmitters becomes decodable at the receiver, potential for higher utilization of the wireless spectrum. Existing NOMA technologies, however, rely on strict power control to sequentially decode the two-user superimposed signal, which is infeasible for many IoT devices that are heterogeneous and often low-cost. In contrast, in this dissertation, we propose new NOMA schemes that are designed for wireless communication systems and can decode the two-user superimposed signals without power control. This dissertation makes four major contributions. First, it presents the first design to implement dynamic signal offsets tracking and reacting schemes to detect and decode two-user superimposed signals, robust against hardware imperfections and feasible for heterogeneous IoT devices. Second, by investigating the relationship between the channel condition and the bit-error-rate (BER) in decoding superimposed signals, we design a reliable NOMA scheme to combat dynamic channel conditions that are inevitable in many practical scenarios and may cause severe decoding errors. Third, considering the wireless communication systems in mobile scenarios, mobility is a vital feature of many applications but can cause severe signal variations and make the hardware offsets harder to predict, resulting in an unreliable decoding performance. To address this, we develop a diversity transmission and smart combining scheme to achieve high reliable decoding performance. Finally, we combine rotation coding to transmit and decode the superimposed signal to achieve both high spectrum efficiency and high reliability performance. To demonstrate our contributions, we derive the theoretical relationship of the BER under different practical settings, validate the performance with simulations, and conduct experiments using software-defined radio based platforms with static indoor, outdoor scenarios and mobile scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our schemes can achieve higher reliability and spectrum efficiency in decoding the superimposed signal for wireless communication systems without power control. / Graduate

The primary purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of the market reaction to stock recommendations published by Swedish banks. The market price reactions will also be compared to the OMXSPI index to analyse if it is possible to earn higher returns by following the recommendations. Previous studies suggest that the effect of stock recommendations leads to higher trading volumes and returns. While previous studies suggest that there is an effect, the effect from stock recommendation is not long lasting. The data collected consist of 659 stock recommendations from the biggest banks in Sweden. The results of the paper are in line with previous studies on the subject. The results suggest that buy recommendations lead to increased trading volumes and returns on the publication day. We also find that the cumulative average return from the recommendations is slightly higher than the index on the publication date. / Huvudsakliga syftet med denna studie är att undersöka marknadsreaktioner på aktierekommendationer utgivna av svenska banker. Syftet är även att jämföra marknadens prisreaktioner med OMXSPI index för att undersöka huruvida avkastningen från rekommendationerna överträffar index. Tidigare forskning har visat att aktierekommendationer leder till högre avkastning och högre handelsvolym. Effekten är däremot inte bestående på längre sikt. Datainsamlingen innehåller 659 aktierekommendationer från storbankerna i Sverige. Resultatet av studien ligger i linje med tidigare forskning. Resultatet visar att köprekommendationer leder till att avkastningen och handelsvolymen ökar i genomsnitt på kort sikt. Studien finner även att den kumulativa avkastningen från rekommendationerna är något högre än index på publiceringsdagen.

The Halloween effect refers to higher stock returns during the period November to April compared to May to October. This is a well-known calendar anomaly that has gained a lot of attention due to the fact that the effect is persistent in the market in spite of the fact that investors are aware of the anomaly today. This evokes questions regarding the efficiency in the markets and the Efficient Market Hypothesis in particular. The main focus of this thesis was to investigate whether the Halloween effect still exists in the Swedish stock market and if the power of the effect deviates between different firm sizes. Furthermore, we examined risk differences between the summer -and the winter months, as well as the January effect in order to find out if these could be possible explanations for the Halloween effect and its existence. A trading strategy based on the Halloween effect was also tested in order to see if investors could use this strategy to outperform a buy and hold strategy. The method that was used to investigate the existence of the Halloween effect was Ordinary Least Squares regression models with dummy variables, standard deviation to ascertain risk-differences between the periods and the Sharpe ratio to determine the risk-adjusted returns of the trading strategies. The results showed that the Halloween effect could be found in all of the examined market-cap indices, and therefore the Efficient Market Hypothesis could be questioned. The Halloween effect turned out to be autonomous from the January effect and the risk measured in standard deviation had no significant difference between the summer -and the winter months, hence, both these possible explanations were rejected. The backtesting showed that the Halloween strategy would perform better than the buy and hold strategy in all indices except from the mid-cap index. The results regarding the Sharpe ratio indicated that the Halloween strategy would be a better strategy to use considering risk-adjusted returns as the Sharpe ratio was higher in all indices.

Wireless sensor networks have the potential for becoming a huge market. Ericsson predicts 50 billion devices interconnected to the Internet by the year 2020. Before that, the devices must be made to be able to withstand years of usage without having to change power source as that would be too costly. These devices are typically small, inexpensive and severally resource constrained. Communication is mainly wireless, and the wireless transceiver on the node is typically the most power hungry component. Therefore, reducing the usage of radio is key to long lifetime. In this thesis I identify four problems with the conventional broadcast primitive. Based on those problems, I implement a new communication primitive. This primitive is called Politecast. I evaluate politecast in three case studies: the Steal the Light toy example, a Neighbor Discovery simulation and a full two-month deployment of the Lega system in the art gallery Liljevalchs. With the evaluations, Politecast is shown to be able to massively reduce the amount of traffic being transmitted and thus reducing congestion and increasing application performance. It also prolongs node lifetime by reducing the overhearing by waking up neighbors.

The purpose of the study is to empirically determine the relevance of PPP theory under the traditional arbitrage and the efficient markets (EPPP) frameworks during the recent floating period of the 1980s. Monthly data was collected for fifteen industrial nations from January 1980 to December 1986. The models tested included the short-run PPP, the long-run PPP, the EPPP, the EPPP with deviations from expectations, the forward rates as unbiased estimators of future spot rates, the EPPP and the forward rates, and the EPPP with forward rates and lagged values. A generalized regression method called Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) was employed to test the models. The results support the efficient markets approach to PPP but fail to support the traditional PPP in both the short term and the long term. Moreover, the forward rates are poor and biased predictors of the future spot rates. The random walk hypothesis is generally supported.

The enviromental footprint on the planet is something that societies andorganizations all over the world are trying to reduce. The forestry sector is not anexception in that matter and work is going on in several areas, among them reductionof soil damages. At the same, competition is constantly pressing the economicalmarginal, increasing the importance of cost-efficiency.This study’s aim was to compare two different methods of forest operations, theSCA-method SED (reducing the risk of damages) with traditional.The study was carried out as a quantative method study by comparing theproductivity of the two methods with three logging teams from autumns 2017 and2018.This study showed that SED only marginally increased the harvesting team’sproductivity compared to traditional cutting.Logging technique, Gentle efficient logging technique, SED, Strengthening actions,ghost row.

One of the key requirements in the design of wireless sensor nodes and miniature biomedical devices is energy efficiency. For a sensor node, which is a sensor and readout circuit, to survive on limited energy sources such as a battery or harvested energy, its energy consumption should be minimized. Capacitive sensors are candidates for use in energy-constrained applications, as they do not consume static power and can be used in a wide range of applications to measure different physical, chemical or biological quantities. However, the energy consumption is dominated by the capacitive interface circuit, i.e. the capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC). Several energy-efficient CDC architectures are introduced in this dissertation to meet the demand for high resolution and energy efficiency in smart capacitive sensors. First, we propose an energy-efficient CDC based on a differential successive-approximation data converter. The proposed differential CDC employs an energy-efficient operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) based on an inverter. A wide capacitance range with fine absolute resolution is implemented in the proposed coarse-fine DAC architecture which saves 89% of silicon area. The proposed CDC achieves an energy efficiency figure-of-merit (FOM) of 45.8fJ/step, which is the best reported energy efficiency to date. Second, we propose an energy efficient CDC for high-precision capacitive resolution by using oversampling and noise shaping. The proposed CDC achieves 150 aF absolute resolution and an energy efficiency FOM of 187fJ/conversion-step which outperforms state of the art high-precision differential CDCs. In the third and last part, we propose an in-vitro cancer diagnostic biosensor-CMOS platform for low-power, rapid detection, and low cost. The introduced platform is the first to demonstrate the ability to screen and quantify the spermidine/spermine N1 acetyltransferase (SSAT) enzyme which reveals the presence of early-stage cancer, on the surface of a capacitive biosensor. This platform, which is a biosensor combined with a highly energy-efficient digital CDC, is implemented and fabricated in a CMOS technology and can sense and convert the capacitance value from the biosensor to a digital word in an energy efficient way. The platform achieves an ultra-low power consumption: four orders of magnitude less than the state-of-the-art biosensor-CMOS platforms.