Modularity for High Flexibility

Behavioral flexibility impacts on coping and emotional responses in male mice submitted to social defeat stress

Metal oxide-based memristors usually exhibit robust resistive switching characteristics but poor mechanical tolerance, limiting their applications in wearable intelligent electronics. Here, we report a highly flexible and robust hafnium oxide-based memristor by using the ultrathin substrate for wearable in-memory computing. The fabricated memristor can display reliable resistive switching behaviors, including low switching voltage, good endurance, and excellent uniformity, under an extremely bending state with the radius of 0.8 mm. The mechanical behavior of the flexible memristor with varying substrate thickness is systematically analyzed using the finite element method. Moreover, typical synaptic plasticity including long-term potentiation and long-term depression was verified under the extremely bending state. Based on the highly flexible and robust memristor device, a three-layer neural network was constructed using a software simulator, achieving a recognition accuracy of 90.49% for handwritten digit recognition under the bending state. These results demonstrate our robust memristor synapse shows high mechanical flexibility, paving a promising way to realizing wearable in-memory computing.

The weak stiffness, huge thickness, and low specific capacitance of commonly utilized flexible supercapacitors hinder their great electrochemical performance. Learning from a biomimetic interface strategy, we design flexible film electrodes based on functional intercalated structures with excellent electrochemical properties and mechanical flexibility. A composite film with high strength and flexibility is created using graphene (reduced graphene oxide (rGO)) as the plane layer, layered double metal hydroxide (LDH) as the support layer, and cellulose nanofiber (CNF) as the connection agent and flexible agent. The interlayer height can be adjusted by the ion concentration. The highly interconnected network enables excellent electron and ion transport channels, facilitating rapid ion diffusion and redox reactions. Moreover, the high flexibility and mechanical properties of the film achieve multiple folding and bending. The CNF-rGO-NiCoLDH film electrode exhibits high capacitance performance (3620.5 mF cm-2 at 2 mA cm-2), excellent mechanical properties, and high flexibility. Notably, flexible all-solid assembled CNF-rGO-NiCoLDH//rGO has an extremely high area energy density of 53.5 mWh cm-2 at a power density of 1071.2 mW cm-2, along with cycling stability of 89.8% retention after 10 000 charge-discharge cycles. This work provides a perspective for designing high-performance energy storage materials for flexible electronics and wearable devices.

The design and fabricationof lithium secondary batteries witha high energy density and shape flexibility are essential for flexibleand wearable electronics. In this study, we fabricated a high-voltage(5 V class) flexible lithium polymer battery using a lithium nickelmanganese oxide (LiNi0.5Mn1.5O4)cathode. A LiNi0.5Mn1.5O4-hybridizedgel polymer cathode (GPC) and a gel polymer electrolyte (GPE) membrane,both containing a sulfolane (SL)-based highly concentrated electrolyte(HCE), enabled the fabrication of a polymer battery by simple laminationwith a metallic lithium anode, where the injection of the electrolytesolution was not required. GPC with high flexibility has a hierarchicallycontinuous three-dimensional porous architecture, which is advantageousfor forming continuous ion-conduction paths. The GPE membrane hassignificant ionic conductivity enough for reliable capacity delivery.Therefore, the fabricated lithium polymer pouch cells demonstratedexcellent capacity retention under continuous deformation conditions.This study provides a promising strategy for the fabrication of scalableand flexible 5 V class batteries using GPC and GPE containing SL-basedHCE.

The traditional methods to implement image processing are either using general programmable digital signal processor (DSP) based instruction or using dedicated signal processing chips. The dedicated chips can deal with tasks they are designed for efficiently, but with others tasks their performance dropped very mich. The general processors have high flexibility but low performance. In many designs, we usually take multi-DSP system to attain the high performance and flexibility but we must face the complex software task on multi-processor system. In this paper, we introduce the concept and advantage of reconfigurable technology. Then we analyzed the real-time requirements of some image-processing algorithms.

Increasing pursuit of next-generation wearable electronics has put forward the demand of reliable energy devices with high flexibility, durability, and enhanced electrochemical performances. Flexible aqueous zinc-air batteries (FAZABs) have attracted great interests owing to the high energy density, safety, and environmental benignity, for which quasi-solid-state gel polymer electrolytes (QSGPEs) are state-of-the-art electrolytes with high ionic conductivity, flexibility, and resistance to leakage problems of traditional liquid electrolytes. Compared to commonly used PVA-KOH electrolyte with poor electrolyte retention capability and cycling stability, a new type of sulfonate functionalized nanocomposite QSGPE is applied in FAZABs with high ionic conductivity, strong alkaline tolerance, and high zinc anode stability. Notably, the existence of (1) strong anionic sulfonate groups of QSGPEs, contributing to the exposure of preferred Zn (002) plane that is more resistant to zinc dendrite formation, and (2) nano-attapulgite electrolyte additives, beneficial for the enhancement of ionic conductivity, electrolyte uptake, and retention capability, endows a ultralong cycling life of 450h for the fabricated FAZAB. Furthermore, flexible energy belts and knittable energy wires fabricated with a series/parallel unit of several FAZABs can be used to power various wearable electronics.

To meet the demand for higher performance, flexibility, and economy in today's state-of-the-art networks, great emphasis is placed on unconventional hardware architectures of network processors. This paper analyzes the problem of processor internal resource and traffic management and proposes a programmable scheduler architecture implemented in a novel protocol processor that deals with the above problems in an integrated way. We briefly outline the architecture of the protocol processor and we support that the innovative scheduling scheme integrated in PRO3 is, in general, crucial for network Systems-on-Chip since it makes it feasible to use scheduler's architecture are discussed that lead to efficient integration of the component to different network processor architectures at a similar cost. Its beneficial features are easy hardware implementation, low memory bandwidth requirements and high flexibility so as to support multiple service disciplines in a programmable way, thousands of flows and even perform different scheduling tasks.

Organic thermoelectric fibers have great potential as wearable thermoelectric textiles because of their one-dimensional structure and high flexibility. However, the insufficient thermoelectric performance, high fabrication cost, and mechanical fragility of most organic thermoelectric fibers significantly limit their practical applications. Here, we employ a rapid and cost-effective wet-spinning method to prepare dimethyl sulfoxide-doped poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) fiber bundles, followed by rational post-treatment with concentrated sulfuric acid (98% H2SO4) to enhance their thermoelectric performance. The wearable fiber bundles composed of multiple individual PEDOT:PSS fibers have effectively reduced resistance and overall high tensile strength and stability. Rational treatment with H2SO4 partially removes excessive PSS, thereby increasing the electrical conductivity to 4464 S cm‒1, while the parallel bundle is also a major factor in improving the power factor of up to 80.8 μW m‒1 K‒2, which is super-competitive compared with those of currently published studies. Besides, the thermoelectric device based on these fiber bundles exhibits high flexibility and promising output power of 2.25 nW at a temperature difference of 25 K. Our work provides insights into the fabrication of all-organic flexible high-conductivity textiles with high thermoelectric properties.Graphical

Pharmacophore modeling for biological targets with high flexibility: LXRβ case study

Increasing demand for flexible devices in various applications, such as smart watches, healthcare, and military applications, requires the development of flexible energy-storage devices, such as lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) with high flexibility and capacity. However, it is difficult to ensure high capacity and high flexibility simultaneously through conventional electrode preparation processes. Herein, smart conductive textiles are employed as current collectors for flexible LIBs owing to their inherent flexibility, fibrous network, rough surface for better adhesion, and electrical conductivity. Conductivity and flexibility are further enhanced by nanosizing lithium titanate oxide (LTO) and lithium iron phosphate (LFP) active materials, and hybridizing them with a flexible 2D graphene template. The resulting LTO/LFP full cells demonstrate high areal capacity and flexibility with tolerance to mechanical fatigue. The battery achieves a capacity of 1.2 mA h cm-2 while showing excellent flexibility. The cells demonstrate stable open circuit voltage retention under repeated flexing for 1000 times at a bending radius of 10 mm. The discharge capacity of the unflexed battery is retained in cells subjected to bending for 100 times at bending radii of 30, 20, and 10 mm, respectively, confirming that the suggested electrode configuration successfully prevents structural damage (delamination or cracking) upon repeated deformation.

Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) has successfully been applied to the FPGA routing. It has many advantages over the conventional one-net-a-time routing algorithm such as routing all nets concurrently, higher flexibility and unroutability provable. However it also has the limits of scalability and is time-consuming. This paper presents some optimizations to the SAT-based routing approach by applying some architecture related features to the generated the Boolean constraints function. Specifically, Switch Box based connectivity optimization to reduce the variable number for each net, Logic Block pins rearrangement to improve the flexibility for each net and Exclusivity constraints optimization based on net-to-track distribution. Each of the optimizations is discussed in detail in this paper. Some heuristics and algorithms are also presented to implement the optimizations. We implement the SAT-based routing strategy as well as the optimizations on a general hierarchical FPGA architecture. The experimental results show that we can greatly reduce the variable and constraint number of the generated Boolean SAT functions. Hence, the generated SAT functions can be solved much more quickly. It also shows that high routing flexibility is also achieved due to the pins rearrangement.

Moss-like nickel-cobalt phosphide nanostructures for highly flexible all-solid-state hybrid supercapacitors with excellent electrochemical performances

In-memory computing (IMC) has been proposed to overcome the von Neumann bottleneck in data-intensive applications. However, existing IMC solutions could not achieve both high parallelism and high flexibility, which limits their application in more general scenarios: As a highly parallel IMC design, the functionality of a MAC crossbar is limited to the matrix-vector multiplication; Another IMC method of logic-in-memory (LiM) is more flexible in supporting different logic functions, but has low parallelism. To improve the LiM parallelism, we are inspired by investigating how the single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) instruction set in conventional CPU could potentially help to expand the number of LiM operands in one cycle. The biggest challenge is the inefficiency in handling non-continuous data in parallel due to the SIMD limitation of (i) continuous address, (ii) limited cache bandwidth, and (iii) large full-resolution parallel computing overheads. This article presents GRAPHIC, the first reported in-memory SIMD architecture that solves the parallelism and irregular data access challenges in applying SIMD to LiM. GRAPHIC exploits content-addressable memory (CAM) and row-wise-accessible SRAM. By providing the in-situ, full-parallelism, and low-overhead operations of address search, cache read-compute-and-update, GRAPHIC accomplishes high-efficiency gather and aggregation with high parallelism, high energy efficiency, low latency, and low area overheads. Experiments in both continuous data access and irregular data pattern applications show an average speedup of 5x over iso-area AVX-like LiM, and 3-5x over the emerging CAM-based accelerators of CAPE and GaaS-X in advanced techniques.

The traditional network architecture cannot meet the growing needs of increasingly diverse network applications. The new generation network architectures, software defined network (SDN) which have features of high openness, flexibility, scalability and high controllability have widely been studied. However, a series of new problems are also produced in this new architecture, such as security problem resulted from the high openness, and performance problem resulted from the high flexibility. Currently, the researchers are mainly concentrated in the implementation and standardisation of SDN. There is no good approach to evaluate and optimise the system performance. This studies the performance problems unresolved in SDN research area, and proposed an idea and method to analyse the control channel of ForCES (Forwarding and Control Element Separation)‐based SDN by using the stochastic network calculus theory. First, the architecture of ForCES‐based SDN is introduced. Then, the performance model of the channel is given. Based on the model, an optimisation method to performance is detailed. This study also gives a simulation by using NS‐2 (Network Simulator, Version 2) to verify the correctness and reliability of the performance model.

BackgroundStalk fracture caused by strong wind can severely reduce yields in maize. Stalks with higher stiffness and flexibility will exhibit stronger lodging resistance. However, stalk flexibility is rarely studied in maize. Stalk fracture of the internode above the ear before tasseling will result in the lack of tassel and pollen, which is devastating for pollination in seed production. In this study, we focused on stalk lodging before tasseling in two maize inbred lines, JING724 and its improved line JING724A1 and their F2:3 population.ResultsJING724A1 showed a larger stalk fracture angle than JING724, indicating higher flexibility. In addition, compared to JING724, JING724A1 also had longer and thicker stalks, with a conical, frustum-shaped internode above the ear. Microscopy and X-ray microcomputed tomography of the internal stalk architecture revealed that JING724A1 had more vascular bundles and thicker sclerenchyma tissue. Furthermore, total soluble sugar content of JING724A1, especially the glucose component, was substantially higher than in JING724. Using an F2:3 population derived from a JING724 and JING724A1 cross, we performed bulk segregant analysis for stalk fracture angle and detected one QTL located on Chr3: 14.00–19.28 Mb. Through transcriptome data analysis and ∆ (SNP-index), we identified two candidate genes significantly associated with high stalk fracture angle, which encode a RING/U-box superfamily protein (Zm00001d039769) and a MADS-box transcription factor 54 (Zm00001d039913), respectively. Two KASP markers designed from these two candidate genes also showed significant correlations with stalk fracture angle.ConclusionsThe internode shape and glucose content are possibly correlated with stalk flexibility in maize. Two genes in the detected QTL are potentially associated with stalk fracture angle. These novel phenotypes and associated loci will provide a theoretical foundation for understanding the genetic mechanisms of lodging, and facilitate the selection of maize varieties with improved flexibility and robust lodging resistance.