Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-71).

In this master thesis, the possibilities of customizing a low-cost microprocessor with the purpose of replacing an existing microprocessor solution are investigated. A brief survey of suitable processors is carried out wherein a replacement is chosen. The replacement processor is then analyzed and extended with accelerators in order to match set requirements. The result is a port of the processor Lattice Mico32 for the FPGA curcuit Xilinx Virtex-5 which replaces an earlier solution using Xilinx MicroBlaze. To reach the set requirements, accelerators for floating point arithmetics and FIR filtering have been developed. The toolchain for the processor has been modified to support the addition of accelerated floating point arithmetics. A final evaluation of the presented solution shows that it fulfills the set requirements and constitutes a functional replacement for the previous solution.

This thesis presents a real-time operating system hardware extension core which supports the integration of hardware accelerators into real-time system-on-chip designs as hardware tasks. The hardware extension core utilizes reconfigurable logic to manage synchronization events, data transfers, and hardware task control. A reduction in interrupt latency, frequency, and execution time provides performance and predictability improvements for real-time applications. Required communication between the CPU and hardware accelerators is also reduced significantly. Compared to a software implementation, synthetic benchmarks of common synchronization tasks show up to a 41% increase in synchronization performance. Analysis of a test case design for audio encoding and encryption using three hardware accelerators shows results of a 2.89x throughput improvement in comparison to the use of software device driver tasks. Overall, this design simplifies the integration of hardware accelerators into real-time system-on-chip designs while improving the performance and predictability of these systems.

Beams of polarized protons play an important part in the study of the spin dependence of the nuclear force by measuring the analyzing power in nuclear reactions. The source at iThemba LABS produces a beam of polarized protons that is pre-accelerated by an injector cyclotron (SPC2) to a energy of 8 MeV before acceleration by the main separated-sector cyclotron to 200 MeV for physics research. The polarized ion source is one of the two external ion sources of SPC2. Inside the ion source hydrogen molecules are dissociated into atoms in the dissociator and cooled to a temperature of approximately 30 K in the nozzle. The atoms are polarized by a pair of sextupole magnets and the nucleus is polarized by RF transitions between hyperfine levels in hydrogen atoms. The atoms are then ionized by electrons in the ionizer. The source has various sensitive devices, which influence beam intensity and polarization. Nitrogen gas is used to prevent recombination of atoms after dissociation. The amount of nitrogen and the temperature at which it is used plays a very important role in optimizing the beam current. The number of electrons released in the ionizer is influenced by the size and shape of the filament. Optimization of the source will ensure that beams of better quality (a better current and stability) are produced.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-86). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.Sc.). / Written for the Dept. of Medical Radiation Physics. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/05/13). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Sc.). / Written for the Medical Physics Unit. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/07/29). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on August 18, 2009) Includes bibliographic references (p. 175-179). Also issued in print.

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Carleton University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-102). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 1997. / Also available in electronic format on the Internet.