The recent popularity and convenience of Wireless communication and the need for integration demands the development of Software Defined Radio (SDR). First defined by Mitoal, the SDR processed the entire bandwidth using a high resolution and high speed ADC and remaining operations were done in DSP. The current trend in SDRs is to design highly reconfigurable analog front ends which can handle narrow-band and wideband standards, one at a time. Charge sampling has been widely used in these architectures due to the built in antialiasing capabilities, jitter robustness at high signal frequencies and flexibility in filter design. This work proposed a 1GHz wideband front end aimed at SDR applications using Transform Domain (TD) sampling techniques. Frequency Domain (FD) sampling, a special case of TD sampling, efficiently parallelizes the signal for digital processing, relaxing the sampling requirements and enabling parallel digital processing at a much lower rate and is a potential candidate for SDR. The proposed front end converts the RF signal into current and then it is downconverted using passive mixers. The front end has five parallel paths, each acting on a part of the spectrum effectively parallelizing the front end and relaxing the requirements. An overlap introduced between successive integration windows for jitter robustness was exploited to create a novel sinc2 downsample by two filter topology. This topology was compared to a conventional topology and found to be equivalent and area efficient by about 44%. The proposed topology was used as a baseband filter for all paths in the front end. The chip was sent for fabrication in 45nm technology. The active area of the chip was 6:6mm2. The testing and measurement of the chip still remains to be done.

Developing a flexible receiver, which can be reconfigured to multiple standards, is the key to solving the problem of embedding numerous and ever-changing functionalities in mobile handsets. Difficulty in efficiently reconfiguring analog blocks of a receiver chain to multiple standards calls for moving the ADC as close to the antenna as possible so that most of the processing is done in DSP. Different standards are sampled at different frequencies and a programmable anti-aliasing filtering is needed here. Windowed integration samplers have an inherent sinc filtering which creates nulls at multiples of fs. The attenuation provided by sinc filtering for a bandwidth B is directly proportional to the sampling frequency fs and, in order to meet the anti-aliasing specifications, a high sampling rate is needed. ADCs operating at such a high oversampling rate dissipate power for no good use. Hence, there is a need to develop a programmable discrete-time down-sampling circuit with high inherent anti-aliasing capabilities. Currently existing topologies use large numbers of switches and capacitors which occupy a lot of area.A novel technique in reducing die area on a discrete-time sinc2 ↓2 filter for charge sampling is proposed. An SNR comparison of the conventional and the proposed topology reveals that the new technique saves 25 percent die area occupied by the sampling capacitors of the filter. The proposed idea is also extended to implement higher downsampling factors and a greater percentage of area is saved as the down-sampling factor is increased. The proposed filter also has the topological advantage over previously reported works of allowing the designers to use active integration to charge the capacitance, which is critical in obtaining high linearity. A novel technique to implement a discrete-time sinc3 ↓2 filter for windowed integration samplers is also proposed. The topology reduces the idle time of the integration capacitors at the expense of a small complexity overhead in the clock generation, thereby saving 33 percent of the die area on the capacitors compared to the currently existing topology. Circuit Level simulations in 45 nm CMOS technlogy show a good agreement with the predicted behaviour obtained from the analaysis.

Not in every case, the designer is knowledgeable about the potential user. Users can be consulted, in order to obtain knowledge, which is required for the design process. However such a consultation process can be problematic, since users may have difficulty in expressing their needs and problems or they may not be aware of them. The study is devised originating from the idea that if appropriate tools are provided for users, they can express their needs and design related problems. The thesis involves a literature review on the necessity of user knowledge as an input for the design process, and methods, techniques and tools, which provide this knowledge. Based on the findings from the literature review, three fictional case studies were planned and performed by employing two techniques, namely mood boards and drawing and shaping ideal products. These two techniques are developed into a procedure step by step by carrying out the case studies. The thesis proposes guidelines for the procedure of &ldquo / user workshops&rdquo / as a way to elicit users&rsquo / tangible and intangible needs, and user defined problems by directing them to imagine and express a usage context and conceptualize solutions considering their design related problems through a concept development activity and additional creative activities.

This study examined the determinants of public pension fund performance through the lens of agency theory. The study sought to answer the following questions: (1) How much of the fluctuation in the performance of pension plans is due to political interference - either directly from decisions made by legislatures or through the governance structure of the pension boards, after controlling for asset allocation, plan size, and other external factors? (2) Do pension board expertise, education and training, and information disclosure requirements improve the performance of pension plans? (3) Do pension trustees strategically determine the actuarial rate of return (discount rate) in order to reduce contributions in times of fiscal stress for the pension sponsor? Using longitudinal data of pension fund performance over the period 2000 to 2009 and instrumental variables methods to address endogeneity issues, the study found partial support for the agency theory hypotheses. The results indicate that political interference through reduced contributions was the main factor explaining pension performance. There was no direct evidence about the negative impact of politically appointed trustees on pension performance. The impact of these findings for current policy and future research are discussed.

ITC/USA 2014 Conference Proceedings / The Fiftieth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 20-23, 2014 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, CA / This paper describes a system framework for a multi-band, multi-mode software defined radio (MBMM SDR) being developed for next-generation telemetry applications. The system framework consists of the multi-band front-end (MBFE), the multi-mode digital radio (MMDR), and the configuration and control (C2) sub-systems. The MBFE consists of an L/S/C-band transceiver architecture that provides wideband operation, band selection, and channel tuning. The MMDR consists of the software and firmware components for high-speed digital signal processing for the telemetry waveforms. Finally, the C2 consists of the software and hardware components for system configuration, control and status. The MBFE is implemented as a standalone hardware sub-system, while the MMDR and C2 are integrated into a single hardware subsystem that utilizes state-of-the-art system-on-chip (SoC) technology. Design methodologies, hardware architectures, and system tradeoffs are highlighted to meet next-generation telemetry requirements for improved spectrum efficiency and utilizations. Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited (412TW-PA-14281).

An open systems architecture (OSA) is one in which all of the interfaces are fully defined, available to the public, and maintained according to a group consensus. One approach to achieve this is to use modular hardware and software and to buy commercial, off-the-shelf and commodity hardware. Benefits of an OSA include providing easy access to the latest technological advances in both hardware and software, enabling net-centric operations, and allowing a flexible design that can easily change as the needs of customers may change. This paper will provide details of an OSA system designed for a telemetry receiver and list the benefits of OSA for the telemetry community.

Software defined radio (SDR) introduces endless possibilities for future communication technologies. Instead of being limited to a static segment of the radio spectrum, SDR allows RF front-ends to be more flexible by using digital signal processing (DSP) and cognitive techniques to integrate adaptive hardware with dynamic software. We present the design and implementation of an innovative RF front-end transceiver architecture for application into a SDR test-bed platform. System-level requirements were extracted from the Space Network User Guide (SNUG). Initial system characterization demonstrated image leakage due to poor filtering and mixer isolation issues. Hence, the RF front-end design was re-implemented using the Weaver architecture for improved image rejection performance.

Laboratory directed evolution have enabled the discovery of numerous functional natural and synthetic macromolecules with tailor-made functions. However, approaches that use enzymes to effect the crucial translation from an information carrier molecule such as DNA or RNA to synthetic polymers are limited to producing close analogs of nucleic acids, either due to a strict requirement to hybridize with a nucleic acid template or as a consequence of the limited substrate scope of polymerase enzymes. / Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Développer des applications réseaux pour des routeurs programmables basés sur les Network Processors (NPs) implique l'utilisation de langages de bas-niveau et d'outils propriétaires fortement dépendants des architectures matérielles sous-jacentes. Le code source, généralement écrit en langage assembleur, n'est pas facile à écrire et cause des problèmes de maintenance. Les applications résultantes sont également difficiles à déboguer. Dans ce mémoire nous proposons NETLANG, un nouveau langage de programmation de haut-niveau dédié aux NPs. De plus d'être un langage simple et élégant, de réduire les coûts de développement et de la maintenance, et d'améliorer la réutilisation du code, NETLANG a pour objectif essentiel de décrire le comportement des paquets dans un NP. NETLANG est un langage qui permet de développer des applications de traitement de paquets. Il établit deux niveaux. Le premier niveau du langage offre une abstraction et une description du routeur à travers un pipeline de tables OpenFlow et des règles de forwarding ayant l'aptitude d'être modifiées dynamiquement et donc de permettre de changer le comportement du routeur à la volée. La sémantique du langage est inspirée du protocole OpenFlow qui a permis d'exprimer les principales tâches de traitement de paquets telles que le parsing, le lookup et la modification. Le langage est bâti en respectant le modèle des Software Defined Networks (SDNs) qui définit un nouveau plan de séparation entre le control plane et le data plane. Le deuxième niveau de NETLANG est traduit en matériel et permet l'adaptabilité du langage à plusieurs plateformes. Des adaptateurs spécifiques à des plateformes différentes sont intégrés au compilateur de NETLANG et permettent de rendre le langage portable. En effet, nous avons utilisé deux environnements pour l'implémentation de NETLANG ; le NP4 d'EZchip caractérisé par sa structure de TOPs (Task Optimized Processors) en pipeline et le NFP-3240 de Netronome connu pour son parallélisme et l'exploitation du multithreading. La validation de NETLANG s'est basée sur un ensemble d'applications réseau ayant des complexités et des domaines différents. A travers ce mémoire nous avons démontré qu'on est capable d'avoir aujourd'hui un langage pour les routeurs programmables. La sémantique d'OpenFlow, sur laquelle nous avons basé notre langage NETLANG, est suffisante et même pertinente en termes de description de comportement des paquets dans un NP. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : langages à domaine spécifique, réseaux programmables, processeurs de réseau.

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