Fault diagnosis plays an important role in improving the circuit design process and the manufacturing yield. With the increasing number of gates in modern circuits, determining the source of failure in a defective circuit is becoming more and more challenging. In this research, we present an efficient effect-cause diagnosis framework for combinational VLSI circuits. The framework consists of three stages to obtain an accurate and reasonably precise diagnosis. First, an improved critical path tracing algorithm is proposed to identify an initial suspect list by backtracing from faulty primary outputs toward primary inputs. Compared to the traditional critical path tracing approach, our algorithm is faster and exact. Second, a novel probabilistic ranking model is applied to rank the suspects so that the most suspicious one will be ranked at or near the top. Several fast filtering methods are used to prune unrelated suspects. Finally, to refine the diagnosis, fault simulation is performed on the top suspect nets using several common fault models. The difference between the observed faulty behavior and the simulated behavior is used to rank each suspect. Experimental results on ISCAS85 benchmark circuits show that this diagnosis approach is efficient both in terms of memory space and CPU time and the diagnosis results are accurate and reasonably precise.

The Knife-Edge Scanning Microscope (KESM) enables imaging of an entire mouse brain at sub-micrometer resolution. By using the data sets from the KESM, we can trace the neuronal and vascular structures of the whole mouse brain. I investigated effective methods for automatic seedpoint selection on 3D data sets from the KESM. Furthermore, based on the detected seedpoints, I counted the total number of somata and traced the neuronal structures in the KESM data sets. In the first step, the acquired images from KESM were preprocessed as follows: inverting, noise filtering and contrast enhancement, merging, and stacking to create 3D volumes. Second, I used a morphological object detection algorithm to select seedpoints in the complex neuronal structures. Third, I used an interactive 3D seedpoint validation and a multi-scale approach to identify incorrectly detected somata due to the dense overlapping structures. Fourth, I counted the number of somata to investigate regional differences and morphological features of the mouse brain. Finally, I traced the neuronal structures using a local maximum intensity projection method that employs moving windows. The contributions of this work include reducing time required for setting seedpoints, decreasing the number of falsely detected somata, and improving 3D neuronal reconstruction and analysis performance.

The influence of elastic anisotropy on seismic wave propagation is often neglected for the sake of simplicity. However, ignoring anisotropy may lead to significant errors in the processing of seismic data and ultimately in a poor image of the subsurface. This is especially true in wide-aperture Vertical Seismic Profiles where waves travel both vertically and horizontally. Anisotropy has been neglected in wavefront construction methods of seismic ray-tracing until Gibson (2000), who showed they are powerful tools to simulate seismic wave propagation in three-dimensional anisotropic subsurface models. The code is currently under development using a C++ object oriented programming approach because it provides high flexibility in the design of new components and facilitates debugging and maintenance of a complex algorithm. So far, the code was used to simulate propagation in homogeneous or simple heterogeneous anisotropic velocity models mainly designed for testing purposes. In particular, it has never been applied to simulate a field dataset. We propose here an analytical method involving little algebra and that allows the design of realistic heterogeneous anisotropic models using the C++ object oriented programming approach. The new model class can model smooth multi-layered subsurface with gradients or models with many dip variations. It has been used to model first arrival times of a wide-aperture VSP dataset from the Gulf of Mexico to estimate the amount of anisotropy. The proposed velocity model is transversely isotropic. The anisotropy is constant throughout the model and is defined via Thomsen's parameters. Values in the final model are epsilon = 0.055 and delta = -0.115. The model is compatible with the a priori knowledge of the local geology and reduces the RMS average time difference between measured and computed travel times by 51% in comparison to the initial isotropic model. These values are realistic and are similar to other measurements of anisotropy in the Gulf of Mexico.

Recently, methods were developed to render various global illumination effects with rasterization GPUs. Among those were hardware based ray tracing and photon mapping. However, due to current GPU??s inherent architectural limitations, the efficiency and throughput of these methods remained low. In this thesis, we propose a coherent rendering system that addresses these issues. First, we introduce new photon mapping and ray racing acceleration algorithms that facilitate data coherence and spatial locality, as well as eliminating unnecessary random memory accesses. A high level abstraction of the combined ray tracing and photon mapping streaming pipeline is introduced. Based on this abstraction, an efficient ray tracing and photon mapping GPU is designed. Using an event driven simulator, developed for this GPU, we verify and validate the proposed algorithms and architecture. Simulation results have validated better interactive performances compared to the current GPUs.

Observing seafloor crustal deformation is often composed of acoustic ranging and GPS positioning techniques, which involves positioning of a single seabed transponder. Generally, the positional uncertainty of the seabed transponder is evaluated in terms of the slant range residuals. In order to further verify the relative positioning accuracy between seabed transponders, this study designed and fabricated a transponder lander. Three transponders were mounted on the lander to form a triangle with sides 1.505, 1.505 and 1.160 m. In addition, a data acquisition and logging system is developed to collect the lander¡¦s attitude, including pitch, roll, heading, and accelerations in three orthogonal axes. A field experiment to verify the relative positioning accuracy between seabed transponders was carried out off the coast of Kaohsiung Harbor, Taiwan. The transponder lander was deployed on the seabed at a water depth of about 300 m. Based on the attitude data collected by the logging system, the heading, pitch and roll of the transponder lander on the seabed are 123.5 degrees, 0.63 degrees and 0.62 degrees, respectively. A vessel was sailed along predetermined paths to collect observations of GPS and acoustic slant range. Then, an optimization technique combined with ray tracing method was used to estimate the positions of three transponders. The position estimates of the three transponders form a triangle with sides 1.533, 1.518 and 1.184 m, which shows that, comparing with the true values, the relative positioning error between transponders is less than 3 cm. Furthermore, based on the estimates of the transponder positions, the heading, pitch and roll of the transponder lander are calculated as 120.45 degrees, 6.43 degrees and 2.51 degrees, respectively, which are in good agreement with that measured by the attitude logging system. The experimental and evaluation results indicate that the optimization technique along with the ray tracing method is practical for precisely estimating the transponder position.

Zugl.: Koblenz, Landau (Pfalz), Univ., Diss., 2008

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, November, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Metastasis is the main cause of cancer morbidity and mortality. Despite its clinical significance, several fundamental questions about the metastatic process in humans remain unsolved. Does metastasis occur early or late in cancer progression? Do metastases emanate directly from the primary tumor or give rise to each other? How does heterogeneity in the primary tumor relate to the genetic composition of secondary lesions? Addressing these questions in representative patient populations is crucial, but has been difficult so far. Here we present a simple, scalable PCR assay that enables the tracing of tumor lineage in patient tissue specimens. Our methodology relies on somatic variation in highly mutable polyguanine (poly-G) repeats located in non-coding genomic regions. We show that poly-G mutations are present in a variety of human cancers. Using colon carcinoma as an example, we demonstrate an association between patient age at diagnosis and tumor mutational burden, suggesting that poly-G variants accumulate during normal division in colonic stem cells. We further show that poorly differentiated colon carcinomas have fewer mutations than well-differentiated tumors, possibly indicating a shorter mitotic history of the founder cell in these cancers. We collect multiple spatially separated samples from primary carcinomas and their metastases and use poly-G fingerprints to build well-supported phylogenetic trees that illuminate each patient's path of progression. Our results imply that levels of intra-tumor heterogeneity vary significantly among patients.

Ray tracing is an attractive rendering option because it can produce high quality images that faithfully represent physically-based phenomena. Its embarrassingly parallel nature makes it a natural choice for rendering large-scale scene data, especially on machines that lack specialized graphics hardware. Unfortunately, the traditional recursive ray tracing algorithm is exceptionally memory inefficient for large scenes, especially when using a shading model that generates incoherent secondary rays. Queueing ray tracers have been shown to control scene state under these conditions, but they allow ray state to grow unchecked. Instead, we propose a ray tracing framework that controls both ray and scene state by dynamically adjusting the rendering algorithm to meet memory requirements. Our dynamic scheduling framework generalizes recursive and queueing tracers into a spectrum of ray schedules that can vary the active amount of ray and scene data in order to match the characteristics of the hardware’s memory system. This dissertation describes our dynamic ray scheduling approach that operates on memory-bound work units, which consist of both rays and scene data. It builds these work units by tracing rays iteratively and queueing them in spatial regions along with nearby data. By dynamically scheduling these work units, our approach can reduce data loads and improve total runtime by 2x to 30x . In addition, we show that our algorithm scales across more than 1000 distributed processors, which is an order of magnitude larger than previously published results. Our approach enables the use of complex lighting models on large data, particularly scientific data, which improves image quality and thereby improves the scientific insights possible. / text

Ray tracing based on geometric optics can be utilized for generating propagation models for arbitrary and complex environments. These methods can be employed to determine important wireless channel characteristics such as path gain and the channel impulse response which in turn can be used to deduce channel capacity. In this thesis, a fully vectorial 3-D ray-tracer is developed. The simulator is applied to study novel wireless systems such as ultra-wideband pulse propagation in complex railway tunnels and MIMO systems employing closely spaced low mutual coupling meta-material antennas. The computational complexity of the ray-tracing algorithm is reduced using optimizations and via the development of a novel hybrid method that combines the efficiency and accuracy of waveguide models with the flexibility of a ray-tracer. The resulting simulator is validated against measured results and demonstrated to show good agreement. Convergence of the solution using the ray-tracing method is also discussed.