La dégradation par électromigration des interconnexions en cuivre damascène est une des principales limitations de la fiabilité des circuits intégrés. Des méthodes de caractérisation complémentaires aux tests de durée de vie, habituellement utilisés, sont nécessaires pour approfondir nos connaissances sur ce phénomène de dégradation. Dans cette étude nous proposons de suivre la croissance par électromigration de la cavité en analysant l'évolution de la résistance de l'interconnexion en fonction du temps. Nous avons, dans un premier temps, étudié les effets de la section de ligne et de la température et, dans un second temps, ceux de la densité de courant et de la longueur de ligne. Nous avons ainsi montré que l'analyse de l'évolution de résistance est une méthode pertinente pour étudier la cinétique de dégradation et en extraire les paramètres caractéristiques tels que l'énergie d'activation du phénomène d'électromigration. Nous avons par ailleurs mis en évidence l'influence de la forme et de la taille de la cavité sur le temps à la défaillance, effet d'autant plus important que la ligne est courte.

Les planètes extrasolaires en orbite proche (Jupiter chauds ou Pégasides) sont soumises à de fortes interactions avec leur étoile: rayonnement, effets gravitationnels, flot de particules, champ magnétique. La planète, baignée dans le champ magnétique de son étoile tout au long de son orbite, peut déclencher des réactions en retour sur son étoile, qui se manifesteraient par exemple par une activité photosphérique induite ou une influence sur le champ magnétique stellaire par interactions de marée. Au cours de cette thèse, le suivi en spectropolarimétrie d'un échantillon d'étoiles hôtes de Jupiter chaud m'a permis d'étudier la structure et l'évolution de leur champ magnétique par imagerie Zeeman-Doppler. Les étoiles étudiées montrent des caractéristiques magnétiques similaires celles des étoiles froides sans Jupiter chaud. Mais pour la première fois, un cycle magnétique a été observé pour une autre étoile que le Soleil. Comparé au cycle magnétique solaire, ce cycle est accéléré, suggérant que la planète pourrait influencer l'étoile. J'ai également exploré un deuxième moyen d'étude de l'influence planétaire sur l'étoile: l'activité stellaire. En plus de ce travail observationnel, j'ai étudié le champ magnétique dans la couronne stellaire, par extrapolation des magnétogrammes de surface. J'ai pu calculer ainsi le budget énergétique au niveau de la planète, un ingrédient essentiel dans la prédiction de l'émission radio exoplanétaire effectué pendant cette thèse.

La compression numérique est devenue un outil indispensable pour la transmission et le stockage de contenus multimédias de plus en plus volumineux. Pour répondre à ces besoins, la norme actuelle de compression vidéo, H.264/AVC, se base sur un codage prédictif visant à réduire la quantité d'information à transmettre. Une image de prédiction est générée, puis soustraite à l'originale pour former une image résiduelle contenant un minimum d'information. La prédiction H.264/AVC de type intra repose sur la propagation de pixels voisins, le long de quelques directions prédéfinies. Bien que très efficace pour étendre des motifs répondants aux mêmes caractéristiques, cette prédiction présente des performances limitées pour l'extrapolation de signaux bidimensionnels complexes. Pour pallier cette problématique, les travaux de cette thèse proposent un nouveau schéma de prédiction basée sur les représentations parcimonieuses. Le but de l'approximation parcimonieuse est ici de rechercher une extrapolation linéaire approximant le signal analysé en termes de fonctions bases, choisies au sein d'un ensemble redondant. Les performances de cette approche ont été éprouvées dans un schéma de compression basé sur la norme H.264/AVC. Nous proposons également un nouveau schéma de prédiction spatiale inter-couches dans le cadre de la compression « scalable » basé sur H.264/SVC. Le succès de telles prédictions repose sur l'habileté des fonctions de base à étendre correctement des signaux texturés de natures diverses. Dans cette optique, nous avons également exploré des pistes visant la création de panels de fonctions de base, adaptées pour la prédiction de zones texturées.

<p>This thesis demonstrates that infants represent temporarily non-visible, or occluded, objects. From 4 months of age, infants could accurately predict the reappearance of a moving object after 660 ms of non visibility; indicating accurate spatiotemporal representations. At this age predictions were dominated by associations between specific events and outcomes (associative rules). Between 6 and 8 months of age predictions became dominated by extrapolations (Study III). From 6 months infants could represent occluded objects for up to 4 seconds. The number of successful predictions decreased, however, if the information contained in the occlusion event diminished (time of accretion and deletion). As infants grew older (up to 12 months) they produced more accurate predictions. (Study II). The similarities between adult and infant performances were numerous (Study I). These conclusion are based on one cross sectional (Study I) and two longitudinal studies (Study II & III) in which an object, a ‘happy face’, moved on circular (Study I, II, & III) and other complex trajectories (Study III). One portion of each trajectory was covered by a screen that blocked the object from sight. In each study participants gaze were recorded with an infrared eye tracking system (ASL 504) and a magnetic head tracker (Flock of Birds). This data was combined with data from the stimulus and stored for of line analysis.</p>

This thesis demonstrates that infants represent temporarily non-visible, or occluded, objects. From 4 months of age, infants could accurately predict the reappearance of a moving object after 660 ms of non visibility; indicating accurate spatiotemporal representations. At this age predictions were dominated by associations between specific events and outcomes (associative rules). Between 6 and 8 months of age predictions became dominated by extrapolations (Study III). From 6 months infants could represent occluded objects for up to 4 seconds. The number of successful predictions decreased, however, if the information contained in the occlusion event diminished (time of accretion and deletion). As infants grew older (up to 12 months) they produced more accurate predictions. (Study II). The similarities between adult and infant performances were numerous (Study I). These conclusion are based on one cross sectional (Study I) and two longitudinal studies (Study II &amp; III) in which an object, a ‘happy face’, moved on circular (Study I, II, &amp; III) and other complex trajectories (Study III). One portion of each trajectory was covered by a screen that blocked the object from sight. In each study participants gaze were recorded with an infrared eye tracking system (ASL 504) and a magnetic head tracker (Flock of Birds). This data was combined with data from the stimulus and stored for of line analysis.

During the past few years, in comparison to traditional riveted structures, integral metallic skin stringer structures have played more and more important roles in aircraft design due to the fact they are economical and also have the ability to reduce weight. Their wide application in aircraft, especially large integral structures is limited because of the fact that they have shortcomings in damage tolerance performance. Hence, calculating the crack growth lives and improving the damage tolerance performance of integral structures by selecting appropriate materials or choosing rational structures is a critical work. Therefore the purpose of this thesis is to find effective analysis methods of integral metallic skin-stringer panels for the use in engineering. Cont/d.

Presented at Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation: Knowledge Extraction as a success story lecture. See for more detail https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/cdi2007/

Seismic imaging involves the solution of an inverse-scattering problem during which the energy of (extremely) large data volumes is collapsed onto the Earth's reflectors. We show how the ideas from 'compressive sampling' can alleviate this task by exploiting the curvelet transform's 'wavefront-set detection' capability and 'invariance' property under wave propagation. First, a wavelet-vaguellete technique is reviewed, where seismic amplitudes are recovered from complete data by diagonalizing the Gramm matrix of the linearized scattering problem. Next, we show how the recovery of seismic wavefields from incomplete data can be cast into a compressive sampling problem, followed by a proposal to compress wavefield extrapolation operators via compressive sampling in the modal domain. During the latter approach, we explicitly exploit the mutual incoherence between the eigenfunctions of the Helmholtz operator and the curvelet frame elements that compress the extrapolated wavefield. This is joint work with Gilles Hennenfent, Peyman Moghaddam, Tim Lin, Chris Stolk and Deli Wang.

No description available.

Scientific computing and computer simulation play an increasingly important role in scientific investigation and engineering designs, supplementing traditional experiments, such as in automotive crash studies, global climate change, ocean modeling, medical imaging, and nuclear weapons. The numerical simulation is much cheaper than experimentation for these application areas and it can be used as the third way of science discovery beyond the experimental and theoretical analysis. However, the increasing demand of high resolution solutions of the Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) with less computational time has increased the importance for researchers and engineers to come up with efficient and scalable computational techniques that can solve very large-scale problems. In this dissertation, we build an efficient and highly accurate computational framework to solve PDEs using high order discretization schemes and multiscale multigrid method. Since there is no existing explicit sixth order compact finite difference schemes on a single scale grids, we used Gupta and Zhang’s fourth order compact (FOC) schemes on different scale grids combined with Richardson extrapolation schemes to compute the sixth order solutions on coarse grid. Then we developed an operator based interpolation scheme to approximate the sixth order solutions for every find grid point. We tested our method for 1D/2D/3D Poisson and convection-diffusion equations. We developed a multiscale multigrid method to efficiently solve the linear systems arising from FOC discretizations. It is similar to the full multigrid method, but it does not start from the coarsest level. The major advantage of the multiscale multigrid method is that it has an optimal computational cost similar to that of a full multigrid method and can bring us the converged fourth order solutions on two grids with different scales. In order to keep grid independent convergence for the multiscale multigrid method, line relaxation and plane relaxation are used for 2D and 3D convection diffusion equations with high Reynolds number, respectively. In addition, the residual scaling technique is also applied for high Reynolds number problems. To further optimize the multiscale computation procedure, we developed two new methods. The first method is developed to solve the FOC solutions on two grids using standardW-cycle structure. The novelty of this strategy is that we use the coarse level grid that will be generated in the standard geometric multigrid to solve the discretized equations and achieve higher order accuracy solution. It is more efficient and costs less CPU and memory compared with the V-cycle based multiscale multigrid method. The second method is called the multiple coarse grid computation. It is first proposed in superconvergent multigrid method to speed up the convergence. The basic idea of multigrid superconvergent method is to use multiple coarse grids to generate better correction for the fine grid solution than that from the single coarse grid. However, as far as we know, it has never been used to increase the order of solution accuracy for the fine grid. In this dissertation, we use the idea of multiple coarse grid computation to approximate the fourth order solutions on every coarse grid and fine grid. Then we apply the Richardson extrapolation for every fine grid point to get the sixth order solutions. For parallel implementation, we studied the parallelization and vectorization potential of the Gauss-Seidel relaxation by partitioning the grid space with four colors for solving 3D convection-diffusion equations. We used OpenMP to parallelize the loops in relaxation and residual computation. The numerical results show that the parallelized and the sequential implementation have the same convergence rate and the accuracy of the computed solutions.