IP Reuse for Flexible & Efficient DSP Platform Chips

With the fast development of diverse electronics, the demand for safe energy storage systems with high energy density and high stability has increased rapidly. So far, lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have dominated the market, from small smart electronics to electric vehicles. Nevertheless, LIBs have several limitations, such as high cost, limited raw material resources, high flammability, and harsh environmental impact. Therefore, novel rechargeable batteries which can mitigate these shortcomings must be explored. Aqueous zinc-ion batteries (ZIBs) have shown a promising future. Zinc with high theoretical volumetric capacity (5855 mAh cm-3) and high stability in aqueous electrolytes should enable high-performing, safe, and low-cost batteries. Additionally, the simple assembly of ZIBs in the ambient environment results in low capital costs. Despite these attractive merits, developing cathode materials with high capacity, rate performance, and stability in order to build commercial high-performing ZIBs, remains a great challenge.Cathode materials directly influence the electrochemical performance of ZIBs. Manganese oxide (MnO2) has been investigated as a promising cathode in ZIBs research due to its good specific capacity, low cost and high safety. However, the low ionic conductivity, slow diffusion kinetics, and low stability of MnO2 severely deteriorate the electrochemical performance and cycling stability of zinc-ion batteries. Recently, a series of studies have revealed the high effectiveness of coating on improving MnO2 cathode stability, including polymer coatings, carbon-based material coatings, artificial cathode-electrolyte interfaces, and metal oxide coatings.[1] Nevertheless, the improvement of other parameters, such as the rate performance, could be further improved for practical usage. In this research, we develop a novel modification method combining coating and doping strategies to induce MnO2 cathode with high capacity, high rate performance and low capacity decay after long-term operation. First, we utilize a facile one-step hydrothermal synthesis for Ag-doped α-MnO2. Different amounts of AgNO3 are added into reactors with KMnO4 and MnSO4 (n(Ag):n(Mn)=1:100-4:100) to investigate the influence of doping on capacity and rate performance. Subsequently, the doped tunnel-type MnO2 cathodes are mixed with precursor solutions of Al2O3 and then thoroughly stirred. Finally, an annealing process is conducted to achieve a nanoscale Al2O3 coating on the tunnel type MnO2. The coating configurations influence the electrochemical performance of cathodes;[2] thus, we test precursor solutions with different concentrations (1-3 wt% Al2O3) and annealing temperatures (500-700 °C) to investigate the influence of coating thickness and annealing treatment.With the assistance of scanning and transmission electron microscopes, the nanoscale Al2O3 layer coating on the doped active material is verified. The stable Al2O3 coating protects active materials from dissolution and structural collapse, improving cycling stability and resulting in high capacity retention after long-term operation. Moreover, a significant improvement in rate performance compared to unmodified MnO2 is verified through electrochemical tests. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and EPR spectra showed that the doped Ag+ ions lead to oxygen vacancies due to the formation of Ag-O-Mn.[3] The abundant vacancies act as active sites, significantly improving conductivity and ion insertion rates. The ex-situ X-ray diffractometer (XRD) and electrochemical tests are used to investigate the ion insertion mechanism during charging/discharging operations. The Ag-MnO2 @ Al2O3 cathode is synthesized through a facile methodology with environment-friendly materials. The modified cathode exhibits promising performance, especially regarding cycling stability and rate performance, which will be a crucial step for developing high-performing cathodes in aqueous zinc-ion batteries.Reference:[1] Shi, W., Lee, W. S. V., & Xue, J. (2021). Recent development of Mn‐based oxides as zinc‐ion battery cathode. ChemSusChem, 14(7), 1634-1658.[2] Zhou, A., Xu, J., Dai, X., Yang, B., Lu, Y., Wang, L., ... & Li, J. (2016). Improved high-voltage and high-temperature electrochemical performances of LiCoO2 cathode by electrode sputter-coating with Li3PO4. Journal of Power Sources, 322, 10-16.[3] Pu, X., Li, X., Wang, L., Maleki Kheimeh Sari, H., Li, J., Xi, Y., ... & Wu, Y. (2022). Enriching Oxygen Vacancy Defects via Ag–O–Mn Bonds for Enhanced Diffusion Kinetics of δ-MnO2 in Zinc-Ion Batteries. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 14(18), 21159-21172. Figure 1

Carrier Dynamics Engineering for High-Performance Electron-Transport-Layer-free Perovskite Photovoltaics

Planar junctionless phototransistor: A potential high-performance and low-cost device for optical-communications

Significant cost reduction is required to improve the competitiveness of concentrating solar power. Heliostats make up a significant proportion of the capital cost of solar tower plants, with low-cost, high-performance designs required to meet levelised cost of energy targets. Lightweight stamped mirror facets are seen in leading commercial solar tower plants, with low manufacturing costs and high optical performance. Here, topography optimisation is investigated as a tool for designing lighter and structurally efficient stiffening bead patterns for stamped mirror facets. A case study is presented demonstrating topography optimisation as a promising tool for facet design, with tailored optimisation approaches incorporating wind and gravity load cases, manufacturing constraints, and combined optical-structural objectives. A range of concepts were generated, and their performance assessed to develop a design framework for high-performance supports. Wind loads in the stow position were found to influence and limit weight reduction more than gravity loads during operation. For the various concepts generated by optimisation, a common geometric feature was clearly-defined radial beads from the mounting points to a peripheral bead, driven by the need to overcome high bending stresses. Prototyping stamped structures is typically expensive. A low-cost and accessible rapid-prototyping method for stamped facets was developed using incremental sheet forming. A framework is presented for fabricating facets incorporating optimised supports, with photogrammetry and deflection tests enabling rapid assessment and structural modelling validation.

We present a low-cost and high-performance 5-bit programmable phased array antenna at Ku-band, which consists of 1-bit reconfigurable radiation structures, digital phase shifters, and a coplanar waveguide feeding network. The 1-bit reconfigurable radiation structure utilizes symmetric geometries and PIN diodes to form stable 180 phase difference. The digital phase shifter provides 168.75 phase difference and together with the radiation structure form a 348.75 phase coverage. The antenna operates between 14.4 and 15.4 GHz, and the overall array contains 24 2 elements with each of them being individually addressable. By changing the states of the diodes and thus adjusting the phase coding sequences of the array, the antenna achieves 0 -60 precise beam scanning at 14.8 GHz, with the sidelobe level, cross-polarization, and gain fluctuation being less than -16 dB, -26 dB, and 2.4 dB, respectively. A prototype was fabricated to verify the design, and the measurement results agree well with simulations. Compared with traditional phased arrays composed of numerous phase shifters and T/R components, the proposed antenna features high performance, high flexibility, low profile, and low cost. The antenna provides a new and feasible solution of wavefront steering and will benefit the various application scenarios.

Commercial, Military and Industrial systems require real-time, high-performance processing and high bandwidth performance. The availability of inexpensive high performance platforms based on commercial off-the shelf (COTS) hardware has made it possible to implement compute intensive applications: however, the complexity of programming parallel or distributed applications has made it difficult for application engineers to fully implement various applications. The potential benefit of using these COTS based computing architectures is often offset by an extensive application refactoring and development effort. By providing a set of user friendly tools that allows architecture trading, automatic mapping and partitioning, and application instrumentation for performance tuning to improve efficiency and throughput, the engineer can save development time while improving performance and lowering cost. In this paper, we describe a suite of system and application development tools, collectively called the Systems and Applications Genesis Environment, SAGE, developed and released by Honeywell for use with distributed high performance computing systems.

This paper describes a highly scalable and high performance analytic server that processes queries initiated by users of SAP Net weaver BI. SAP Net weaver BI accelerator and its main architectural and technical features and how the accelerator can be used for optimial performance being compatible to any IT industry at lowest operational costs using data splitting concept are further described. The objective is to provide users in any large scale business BI industries across the world with high performance data access environment that is aligned with emerging business and technology architectures. I. INTRODUCTION The twenty first century has come to be known as the 'Information Age', where anybody with a huge source of information and the ability to assimilate and synthesize data at a lightning pace has the 'POWER'. Making timely business decisions has never been easy, but the increasing volume of available information makes it more difficult than ever. A number of global companies are scrambling to get SAP BIA implemented to mitigate the poor query response times with burgeoning data. The Business Intelligence Accelerator was developed for deployment in the IT Landscape of any company that stores large and growing volumes of business data in a standard relational database. Currently, most approaches to accessing the data held in such databases confront IT staff with a maintenance challenge. From the standpoint of company decision making, the key benefits of SAP Net Weaver BI with the accelerator are speed, flexibility, and low cost. SAP Net weaver BI accelerator is a new application that helps to analyse large amounts of critical business information up to hundred times faster than alternate tools that are available in the market. Compared with most previous approaches, this appliance offers an order of magnitude improvement in speed and flexibility of access to the data. This improvement is significant in business contexts where existing approaches impose quantifiable costs (1). This application benefits business that has high volumes of data enables quick access to any data with a low amount of administrative effort and is especially useful for sophisticated

Recently users from both high-performance scientific community and general-purpose applications have shown keen interest in parallel processing due to its higher performance, lower cost, and sustained productivity [148]. To solve a computationally intensive problem efficiently on a cluster of existing computers, distributed computing involves a significantly lower cost factor [156]. Although it is difficult for a distributed computing user to achieve the computational capacity of large massively parallel processors (MPP), it is possible to solve large-size problems by combining a variety of distributed computing resources, connected by high-speed networks. This approach has advantages in terms of flexibility, scalability, and low cost. The advantage of using a cluster of workstations as the computational platform is that a cluster of a large number of workstations is easily available. A disadvantage is that there may be many users running unrelated tasks on the workstations so that the available computing resource for each task fluctuates in an unpredictable manner. Furthermore, communication between workstations is relatively slow. Although the performance of generalized cross-validation (GCV)–based threshold selection scheme is excellent, it is costly from CPU time viewpoint when implemented sequentially. In contrast to the traditional parallel approaches, which rely on specialized parallel machines, present work explores the potential of distributed systems for parallelism. The master/slave model is adopted for control of machines. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 4.1 presents background material and review of work in related area. Section 4.2 presents parallel algorithm of DWT. Basics of PVM programming has been discussed in Sect. 4.3. KeywordsPVMParallel algorithmsSpeedup

Steady FPGA density and speed improvement in recent years has paved the path for realization of larger Neural Networks On a Programmable Chip (NNOPC), a high performance and low cost alternative to traditional physical implementations of artificial neural networks. In this paper, we propose a parametric approach for mapping artificial neural networks onto FPGA structures, as well as an optimization method to reduce area requirements of the synthesized hardware. Applying this method to a sample neuron, we achieved a 30% reduction in hardware resource requirements of the synaptic multiplier.

Experimental investigation of a low cost inclined wick solar still with forced continuous flow

This paper presents an improved real time target tracking system based on Cam-Shift and advanced Kalman filter algorithms. The paper, proposes a simple low implementation cost scheme while keeping the high tracking performance. Two degrees of freedom target tracking system based on two hybrid stepper motors with their drive systems is fully designed and implemented to improve the tracking accuracy while keeping low-cost. The potential of the proposed algorithm lies in its ability to accurately detect, track and produce firing commands on the designated target while utilizing low cost on the shelf embedded Microcontroller boards. A low cost Universal Serial Port (USB) camera is used and integrated with the proposed algorithm in order to detect and track maneuvering targets. A series of experiments for stationary and moving objects are carried out for testing the proposed system efficiency. The proposed system enables accurate performance for tracking static and moving objects. Hence it provides a simple and low implementation cost scheme for real time object tracking applications.

A low-cost iron-cadmium redox flow battery for large-scale energy storage

Wafer level package (WLP) sample is one of the most popular packaged methods due to its low cost (wafer batch process), high performance, small form factor and low assembly cost [1]. Decapsulation is necessary for failure analysis. Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 are the sketch maps of the WLP wafer with Sn balls on the chip. The stannum (Sn) ball on the package need be removed while the copper line (Re-distribution Line, RDL) under the polyimide (PI) and chip inter metal can't be damaged. This paper discuss that a new etchant was developed for WLP Sn ball removing. The etchant is a mixture which contains an etchant (nitric acid), an accelerant (Cl-), an oxidant, a depressor and deionization (DI) water. The primary chemical of the solution is nitric acid, which reacts with Sn balls on the top surface of the chip. The other components of the solution are an oxidant, an accelerant and a depressor, which are used to control etching rate and solution's characteristics. The results of the etchant are observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Focus ion beam (FIB), which can evaluate that whether the Sn balls on samples' surface are removed or not and whether the copper lines inside of the chip are damaged or not. Compared with conventional Ni etchant, the new etchant can satisfy the following requirement: (1) It can remove Sn ball rapidly (several minutes); (2) The copper line in the RDL and chip can't be damaged; (3) The sample surface is clean and can be observed easily; (4) The cost is much lower, which is only no more than one tenth of Ni etchant.

Sixteen Latin American cities have embraced Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)as a key component of their transit systems. Systems in nine cities are described. The systems are characterised by high performance (5,000-43,000 passengers/hour/direction), general high user acceptance, comparatively low capital investment (US$ 1.0 million/km to US$ 12.5 million/km) and little or no operational subsidies. BRT has been a key element in transit reform, changing the way service is delivered. The systems have reduced travel time, transport cost, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and accidents. Some cities have also experienced significant positive impacts in the built environment. BRT systems expansion is underway in most cities, and several additional Latin American cities have implemented or are in the process of implementing BRT systems. The cities have also faced some system implementation and operational difficulties due to institutional and financial constraints.

Sustainable synthesis of highly water-selective ZSM-5 membrane by wet gel conversion