Significant characteristic of any VLSI design circuit is its power, reliability, operating frequency and implementation cost. Dynamic CMOS designs provide high operating speeds compared to static CMOS designs combined with low silicon area requirement. This thesis describes the design and the optimization of high performance carry select adder. Previous researchers believed that existing CSA designs has reached theoretical speed bound. But, only a considerable portion of hardware resources of traditional adders are used in worst case scenario. Based on this observation our proposed design will improve on theoretical limit. The major scope of this proposed design is to increase the speed of carry generation between intermediate blocks of Carry select Adder (CSA) by introducing fast multiple clock Domino Manchester carry chain (MCC) that generates carry outputs. This design technique will have some advantages compared to pre-existing implementations in operating speed and power delay product. Simulation has been done using GPDK (Generic Process Design Kits) technology using cadence virtuoso. Thus the proposed technique provides advantages over pre-existing techniques in terms of operating speed.

The purpose of this essay then is to gain insight into the utilisation of MCQ’s within the field of law at Swedish upper secondary schools and in this question what kind of knowledge requirements can be tested with MCQ. Also, the difference in test results between non-MCQs and MCQ was analyses in large and when it came to gender. Here a MCQ test was evaluated based upon the knowledge requirements while quantitative date gathered from a utilisation of MCQ within the field of employment law was analysed. It was found that it should be possib- le to utilise MCQ within the field of law. With regards to difference in results between non- MCQ and the MCQ under scrutiny it was found that high performing students scored above one grade lower on MCQ than the average of three non-MCQ’s in other subjects. Low per- forming students experienced a little improvement in their results. There was a slightly diffe- rence when it came to score in between gender. Although the average female score on all tests where higher than their male counterpart, females scored a little lower on their first MCQ test. It was felt that the scope of this research is too small to allow any conclusions to be drawn.

The chondroitin sulphate proteoglycan (CSPG) versican forms complexes with hyaluronan (HA), which are essential in a range of functions including cellular proliferation and migration. Four isoforms of versican result from alternative splicing. Furthermore, biological roles have been identified for the proteolytic cleavage product of versican which contains the N-terminal G1 hyaluronan binding domain. All of these versican forms have different tightly regulated tissue expression profiles. Consequently, impaired regulation is associated with a number of disease pathologies. For example the largest variants (V0/V1) have been shown to be negative indicators of disease outcome in a number of malignant cancers and are a marker of disease progression in atherosclerosis. Interestingly, the smaller versican isoform V3 which lacks CS chains has been demonstrated to have the potential to reverse disease associated phenotypes. The motivation for carrying out the work in this thesis was to try and gain a better understanding of how versican functions on a molecular scale. In this regard, the first aim was to investigate the structure of the hyaluronan binding region of versican using a construct called VG1. The structure of VG1 was analysed in the presence and absence of hyaluronan oligomers. This revealed an insight into the multi-modular structure of the versican hyaluronan binding region and demonstrated that on binding to HA, VG1 under goes a conformational change. Furthermore, the interaction between VG1 and longer lengths of hyaluronan (pHA) was investigated. This demonstrated that when VG1 binds to pHA it is does so with positive cooperativity, packing very close to neighbouring VG1 molecules along a chain of HA. One consequence of this interaction was to reorganise pHA into a helical conformation, an organisation that was confirmed by a number of solution phase techniques. The effect of this reorganisation of pHA by VG1 on HA/CD44 interactions was also assessed. Previously the interaction between CD44 (a cell surface hyaluronan receptor) and long chains of HA (>30 kDa) was shown to be irreversible; however we demonstrate that VG1 can reverse this. Furthermore, a TSG-6 enhanced CD44/interaction was also completely reversed by the addition of VG1. This provides an indication that a functional hierarchy of hyaluronan binding proteins may exist which could have important implications in understanding the function of hyaluronan complexes. Currently, we do not know whether intact versican molecules could interact with HA in the same way as VG1. However, preliminary data suggests that the CS-containing variants (i.e. V0, V1 and V2) would not, whereas V3 and versican fragments could. This work provides an exciting mechanistic insight into the function of versican variants and their breakdown products.

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All around the globe the consumption of raw materials by the construction industries isaccumulating day by day resulting with an depletion of natural resources, increasing the environmental impacts and CO2 emissions all over the surroundings. Today steel and concrete are widely used and are dominating construction materials in construction industry. These two construction materials are different products and have distinct production flow with significantimpact on the environment. The amount of embodied energy and operational energy which is consumed in the process of production, recycling and reuse are becoming increasingly more important in the construction industries due to the potential shortage of natural resources in thenear by future and due to the inflation in the energy prices. This master’s thesis determines some of the problems of antagonistic environmental impacts due to the use of steel and concrete in the construction industries. To mitigatethese environmental impacts there are two technology and policy strategies summarizedin this thesis. i. Reduce consumption; andii. Material selection to reduce impacts.i. Reduce consumption: All around the globe the consumption of materials is growing day by day with an increase in the population resulting with a depletion of virgin materials. This depletion of virgin materials can be reduced with the help ofrecycling and reuse of the structural members. Recycling of structural members isalready practiced widely than reuse; reuse of the structural members additionallyreduces the consumption of virgin materials. High level of reuse of the structuralmaterials can be achieved by establishing design standards and regulations forstructural sections, and developing a market for reusable structural sections.ii. Material selection to reduce impacts: For the selection of constructionmaterials with minimum impact on the environment the designers needs tohave apropos education or tools. The main areas for augmentation areidentified as education of designers, and standardization and simplification ofselection tools like Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Some of the main recommendations are: LCA tools standardization; reduce the impact sections and make these impact sections comprehendible and integrate uncertainty dataand educating designers about material selection tools with organized programs.

This thesis is an examination of policy-making and practice in design education in England from 1837-1992. It takes a longue durée approach to the history of the development of design education to provide a new narrative which shows a pattern of recurring debates concerning the purpose of design education and how it should be taught. Using the curricula of furniture design courses at three art schools to illustrate the way policy was put into practice, this thesis argues that historical context is key to understanding why debates regarding the way designers should be trained for industry have recurred since 1837. Based on a wide variety of primary source material the thesis contributes to historiography by extending the scope of previous histories of art and design education, and also, for the first time, focuses solely on the development of design education, whilst acknowledging its place in the wider development of art and design education. Following the introduction, chapter two of this thesis examines the events which led to the 1835-6 Select Committee and argues that many of the issues raised during the Committee influenced the teaching of design education through the remainder of the nineteenth century; this is further demonstrated through chapter three. Charting the development of design education into the twentieth century through chapters four, five and six, this thesis shows that changing historical contexts, such as the development of industrial methods or wider changes in higher education, have also had an impact on design education. In the light of changing historical contexts, policy makers for design education have continually questioned what design students should be taught and how they should be taught, which accounts, in part, for the recurring nature of debates in design education.

The goal of the research reported in this thesis is to establish the feasibility of a novel optical architecture for an optical route & select circuit switch suitable for implementation as a photonic integrated circuit. The proposed architecture combines Optical Phased Array (OPA) switch elements implemented as multimode interference coupler based Generalised Mach-Zehnder Interferometers (GMZI) with a planar Lüneburg lens-based optical transpose interconnection network implemented using graded metamaterial waveguide slabs. The proposed switch is transparent to signal format and, in principle, can have zero excess insertion loss and scale to large port counts. These switches will enable the low-energy consumption high capacity communications network infrastructure needed to provide environmentally-friendly broadband access to all. The thesis first explains the importance of switch structures in optical communications networks and the difficulties of scaling to a large number of switch ports. The thesis then introduces the Talbot effect, i.e. the self-imaging of periodic field distributions in free space. It elaborates on a new approach to finding the phase relations between pairs of Talbot image planes at carefully selected positions. The free space Talbot effect is mapped to the waveguide Talbot effect which is fundamental to the operation of multimode interference couplers (MMI). Knowledge of the phase relation between the MMI ports is necessary to achieve correct operation of the GMZI OPA switch elements. An outline of the design procedures is given that can be applied to optimise the performance of MMI couplers and, as a consequence, the GMZI OPA switch elements. The Lüneburg Optical Transpose Interconnection System (LOTIS) is introduced as a potential solution to the problem of excessive insertion loss and cross-talk caused by the large number of crossovers in a switch fabric. Finally, the thesis explains how a Lüneburg lens may be implemented in a graded ‘metamaterial’, i.e. a composite material consisting of ‘atoms’ arranged on a regular lattice suspended in a host by nano-structuring of silicon waveguide slabs using a single etch-step. Furthermore, the propagation of light in graded almost-periodic structures is discussed. Detailed consideration is given to the calibration of the local homogenised effective index; in terms of the local parameters of the metamaterial microstructure in the plane and the corrections necessary to accommodate slab waveguide confinement in the normal to the plane. The concept and designs were verified by FDTD simulation. A 4×4 LOTIS structure showed correct routing of light with a low insertion loss of -0.25 dB and crosstalk of -24.12 dB. An -0.45 dB excess loss for 2D analysis and an -0.83 dB insertion excess loss for 3D analysis of two side by side metamaterial Lüneburg lenses with diameter of 15 μm was measured, which suggests that the metamaterial implementation produces minimal additional impairments to the switch.

Trees are one of the most fundamental structures in computer science. Standard pointer-based representations consume a significant amount of space while only supporting a small set of navigational operations. Succinct data structures have been developed to overcome these difficulties. A succinct data structure for an object from a given class of objects occupies space close to the information-theoretic lower-bound for representing an object from the class, while supporting the required operations on the object efficiently. In this thesis we consider representing trees succinctly. Various succinct representations have been designed for representing different classes of trees, namely, ordinal trees, cardinal trees and labelled trees. Barring a few, most of these representations are static in that they do not support inserting and deleting nodes. We consider succinct representations for cardinal trees that also support updates (insertions and deletions), i.e., dynamic cardinal trees. A cardinal tree of degree k, also referred to as a k-ary cardinal tree or simply a k-ary tree is a tree where each node has place for up to k children with labels from 1 to k. The information-theoretic lower bound for representing a k-ary cardinal tree on n nodes is roughly (2n+n log k) bits. Representations that take (2n+n log k+ o(n log k ) ) bits have been designed that support basic navigations operations like finding the parent, i-th child, child-labeled j, size of a subtree etc. in constant time. But these could not support updates efficiently. The only known succinct dynamic representation was given by Diego, who gave a structure that still uses (2n+n log k+o(n log k ) ) bits and supports basic navigational operations in O((log k+log log n) ) time, and updates in O((log k + log log n)(1+log k /log (log k + log log n))) amortized time. We improve the times for the operations without increasing the space complexity, for the case when k is reasonably small compared to n. In particular, when k=(O(√(log n ))) our representation supports all the navigational operations in constant time while supporting updates in O(√(log log n )) amortized time.