<p> </p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong> </strong></p><p>Befintliga studier har påvisat att genetiska algoritmer presterar bättre om de ges en bra startpopulation. I denna rapport presenteras en lokal sökalgoritm för att skapa en population med fokus på ”vehicle routing”-problem. Algoritmen använder sig av heuristik i en blandning av simulated annealing och tabu search för att skapa individerna till populationen. Utvärderingar av algoritmen på ett praktiskt problem visar att den ger en bra start jämfört med en slumpmässig startpopulation, vilket är vanligt att använda. Resultaten av utvärderingen visar också att algoritmen ger bäst resultat vid mer komplexa problem, medan den har mindre effekt om problemet är enklare.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Nyckelord: </strong>Simulated annealing, Tabu search, Genetiska algoritmer , ”vehicle routing”-problem.</p><p> </p>

<p>Is it possible for a minimal model of anaerobic muscle contraction to describe measured data? There have been many models trying to describe separate parts of the human body with various results. In this thesis a model has been created to describe all the essential biochemical reactions of anaerobic muscle metabolism during contraction but with as few states and parameters as possible. A toolbox in Matlab was used for simulation and also for parameter estimation. The best model eventually got validated to see statistically how well it can describe the measured data. During the simulations an unnecessary assumption got revealed which helped us to understand the system better. The vision of a whole-body model may not be so far into the future as many think and the first step is to understand smaller biochemical systems like muscle contraction.</p>

<p>In this report we describe an adaptive simulated annealing method for sizing the devices in analog circuits. The motivation for use an adaptive simulated annealing method for analog circuit design are to increase the efficiency of the design circuit. To demonstrate the functionality and the performance of the approach, an operational transconductance amplifier is simulated. The circuit is modeled with symbolic equations that are derived automatically by a simulator.</p>

<p>One-dimensional ZnO nanostructures have great potential applications in the fields of optoelectronic and sensor devices. Therefore, it is really important to realize the controllable growth of one-dimensional ZnO nanostructures and investigate their properties. The main points for this thesis are not only to successfully realize the controllable growth of ZnO nonawires, nanorods and quantum dots (QDs), and also investigate the structure and optical properties in detail by the methods of scan electron microscope(SEM), transmission electron microscope(TEM), resonant Raman, photoluminescence(PL) and low-temperature time resolved PL spectrum.</p><p>to grown ZnO nanorod arrays (ZNAs) on Si substrates. Firstly, the effects of ZnO nanoparticles, pH value of chemical solution, angel θ between substrate and beaker bottom on the structures of the samples were symmetrically investigated and the optimized growth condition to grow ZNAs can be concluded as follows: seed layer of ZnO nanoparticles, pH=6 and <em>θ</em>=70°. On the basis of these, the diameter of ZNAs was well controlled from 150nm~40nm through adjusting the diameter and density of the ZnO nanoparticles pretreated on the Si substrates. The experimental results indicated that both diameter and density of ZnO nanoparticles on the substrates determined the diameter of ZNAs. But when the density is higher than the critical value of 2.3×10⁸cm^-2, the density will become the dominant factor to determine the diameter of ZNAs.</p><p>One the other hand, the optical properties of ZNAs were investigated in detail. The Raman and photoluminescence (PL) results showed that after an annealing treatment around 500oC in air atmosphere, the crystal structure and optical properties became much better due to the decrease of surface defects. The resonant Raman measurements excited by 351.1nm not only revealed that the surface defects play a significant role in the as-grown sample, but also suggested that the strong intensity increase of some Raman scatterings was due to both outgoing resonant Raman scattering effect and deep level defects scattering contribution for ZnO nanorods annealed from 500°C to 700°C. It is the first time to the best of our knowledge that the Raman measurements can be used to monitor the change of surface defects and deep level defects in the CBD grown ZnO nanorods. We have also presented, for the first time, a time resolved PL study in CBD grown ZnO nanorods with different diameters. The results show that the decay time of the excitons in the nanorods strongly depends on the diameter of the nanorods. The altered decay time is mainly due to the surface recombination process. The effective time constant related to the surface recombination velocity was deduced. A thermal treatment under 500°C will suppress the surface recombination channel, resulting in an improvement of the optical quality for the ZnO nanorods.</p><p>This thesis not only provides the effective way to control the size of ZNAs, but also obtains some beneficial results in aspects of their optical properties, which builds theoretical and experimental foundation for much better and broader applications of one-dimensional ZnO nanostructures.</p>

Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit dem Versuch der Optimierung von Simulated Annealing. Genauer gesagt, werden Simulationsergebnisse für einfache Spinglassysteme in Abhängigkeit von verschiedenen Nachbarschaftsmodellen berechnet – jeweils unter Verwendung des optimalen Abkühlverlaufs. Ziel ist es, eine Faustregel für die dynamische Anpassung der Nachbarschaftsbeziehung während einer Annealing-Simulation zu finden. / The thesis at hand presents an attempt to optimize simulated annealing. In particular, annealing results are computed based on different move class definitions for Ising spin systems while simultaneously applying an existing algorithm to determine the optimal temperature schedule for each case. The aim is to find a rule of thumb for dynamic adjustment of the move class during an annealing run.

Thin film solar cells with Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide (Cu(In,Ga)Se2) absorber layers is one of the most promising candidates to emerge as an efficient solar cell technology in the near future. CIGS cells with efficiencies of 19.2 % have already been reported [1]. In this study, CIGS absorber layers are fabricated by a two-stage all-solid-state manufacture-friendly process. In the first stage, designated as precursor deposition, Copper and Gallium are sequentially deposited followed by co-deposition of Indium and Selenium. In the second stage, designated as selenization, the substrate is annealed at high temperatures in a selenium environment during which a thin layer of copper is also deposited. The typical thickness of the absorber layers fabricated by this process is around 2um. The ZnO transparent front contact of these cells is a bi-layer with a thin intrinsic layer and a thicker Al doped n-type layer. These layers have been fabricated by different methods using Al-doped and undoped ZnO targets. The effect of the intrinsic layer thickness on the device performance was studied. Best performances were obtained when the intrinsic layer was around 350° thick and fabricated from an Al-doped ZnO target with excess oxygen partial pressure during deposition. The main focus of this work is to reduce the thickness of the CIGS absorber layers with no or minor loss in efficiency as this would translate directly into reduction in production costs and the amount of material being used. Reducing the thickness can be done either by reducing the deposition rates or duration of deposition. Due to the complex time-temperature profile during fabrication, reducing the thickness by reducing the deposition time would also affect the duration for which the substrates will be at high temperatures. To understand what effect this would have in film formation and performance of the device, and if any post-deposition annealing would be required to compensate for the reduced time at temperatures, experiments were carried out with the cells being annealed at different stages before and after completion of the device itself. Annealing was done at 250°C in both air and vacuum. Although annealing the finished devices always yielded poorer performance, it was certainly helpful in understanding which aspects of the device were affected. Devices with reduced absorber layer thicknesses of 1.5um, 1.0um and 0.65um were fabricated. The devices showed improved Voc's when the absorber layer thickness was reduced to 1.5um and 1.0um but the Jsc's dropped by 2-3 mA/cm2. The 1.0um thick devices also showed an increase in band gap. The thickness of the Molybdenum back contact layer was increased to see if the amount of Sodium from the substrate had any effect on the device performance. The Ga/In ratio was altered and its effect was also studied. The 0.65um thick devices showed a large reduction in Voc's and Jsc's. The effect of Selenization time and Selenium flux during Selenization were studied at each of the different thicknesses.

Traditional approaches for power optimization during high level synthesis, have targetted single-cycle designs where only one input is being processed by the datapath at any given time. Throughput of large single-cycle designs can be improved by means of pipelining. In this work, we present a framework for the high-level synthesis of pipelined datapaths with low leakage power dissipation. We explore the effect of pipelining on the leakage power dissipation of data-flow intensive designs. An algorithm for minimization of leakage power during behavioral pipelining is presented. The transistor level leakage reduction technique employed here is based on Multi-Threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) technology. Pipelined allocation of functional units and registers is performed considering fixed data introduction intervals. Our algorithm uses simulated annealing to perform scheduling, allocation, and binding for obtaining pipelined datapaths that have low leakage dissipation.

In recent years, research on development of chemical, biological and hazardous gas sensors for homeland security have attracted great deal of interest. Actuators possessing high sensitivity, easy fabrication techniques and excellent integration compatibility are in great demand. Towards this need, the development and characterization of improved sol-gel processing for in-house fabrication of highly sensitive and reliable Flexural Plate Wave (FPW) device was pursued This work focuses on an experimental design approach to improve texture and morphology of PZT thin film by systematically controlling the spin, pyrolysis and anneal cycles. The process alterations resulted in an 8-fold increase in the relative intensity of perovskite (111) phase, which consequently yielded a two fold improvement in remnant polarization and coercive field compared to industry recommended processes.

We present a method of mitigating theft of sequential circuit Intellectual Property hardware designs through means of watermarking. Hardware watermarking can be performed by selectively embedding a watermark in the state encoding of the Finite State Machine. This form of watermarking can be achieved by matching a directed graph representation of the watermark with a sub-graph in state transition graph representation of the FSM. We experiment with three approaches: a brute force method that provides a proof of concept, a greedy algorithm that provides excellent runtime with a drawback of sub-optimal results, and finally a simulated annealing method that provides near optimal solutions with runtimes that meet our performance goals. The simulated annealing approach when applied on a ten benchmarks chosen from IWLS 93 benchmark suite, provides watermarking results with edge overhead of less than 6% on average with runtimes not exceeding five minutes.

The effects of intermetallic compound (IMC) formation on reliability of Pb-free Sn-based solders for flip chip and three-dimensional (3D) interconnects were studied. The dissertation is organized into four parts. In the first part, the effect of Sn grain orientation on electromigration (EM) reliability of Pb-free Sn-based flip chip solder joints was studied. The Sn grain microstructure in flip chip solder joints was characterized using the electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) technique, and wa found to be closely related to the EM failure mechanims. The approach to grain structure optimization for improved EM reliability was also explored. In addition to the experimental work, a kinetic analysis was formulated to investigate the early EM degradation mechanism in Sn-based solder joints with Ni under-bump metallization (UMB). The aforementioned kinetic analysis, the intrinsic diffusion coefficients were not readily available in the literature. In the second part of the work, a Monte Carlo method known as simulated annealing was applied to estimate the unknown diffusion coefficients using a multi-parameter optimization method by fitting to experimental measurements. The intrinsic diffusion coefficients of Ni and Sn in Ni₃Sn₄ between 150 and 200°C, and those of Cu and Sn in Cu₃Sn and Cu₆Sn₅ between 120 and 200°C were estimatd. The activation energies for these diffusion coefficients were also determined. Together, this provides the diffusivity parameters to predict the intermetallic growth as a function of temperature. The third objective focused on the EM reliability of Sn-based microbump joints in 3D interconnects with through-silicon vias (TSVs). No EM-induced bump failure was observed, showing a robust EM reliability in microbumps. High temperature thermal annealing test was also performed on microbumps with three different metallizations in an effort to explore structural and process optimization. Finally, interfacial reaction induced stress in IMC microbumps was investigated. A numerial analysis was formulated to study the concurrent diffusion, phase transformation, and deformation in the process of IMC formation. Stress generation due to unbalanced diffusion rates and volumetric change upon phase transformation was considered. The coupled analysis was applied to investigate Ni₃Sn₄ growth in the Ni-Sn microbumping system. A simulation approach based on finite difference method with moving boundaries was employed to numerically solve stress evolution in Ni₃Sn₄. The equilibrium stress was also investigated using a modified model with a finite thickness of solder. Simulation predictions were found to be in good qualitative agreement with experimental observations. / text